ABSTRACT
James Joyce employs his source by abstracting the quality of namby-pambyness from the events and applying it to the style of his own Nausicaa episode. As in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the background of Ulysses, unlike that of the Odyssey, is one of a grinding lower-middle-class poverty: stale, threadbare, malodorous. If the general analogy about the Odyssey and Ulysses is to mean anything at all, it must mean more than the set of correspondences in characters and story which has been exhaustively explored and annotated up to this point. It must mean more, even, than the painfully recondite tracking down of allusions, of place names, in short, the etymological study to which much of the scholarship surrounding Joyce's Ulysses reduces itself. It seems that the qualitative aspects of Ulysses in relation to its three thousand year old model can best be suggested in terms of their differences.
