ABSTRACT
This book [Ulysses] is perhaps the most thoroughgoing literary attempt to analyze the ancient problem of evil since Goethe’s Faust. Joyce is well aware that he risks comparison with Dante and Milton, among others; he provokes and challenges such comparisons. As one might guess from the title, his book is a deliberate contrast throughout with the Odyssey. Moreover, George Russell has stated that it is the Inferno of an unfinished trilogy; so Dante is involved. In the text, the father-son problem of Hamlet is discussed, and has influenced the plot radically. To the names of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, we must add that of Blake, for all the modern Irishmen have read him. Probably Milton suggested the first part, and Goethe’s denying spirit, Mephistopheles, may have influenced the conception of Malachi Mulligan. …[pp. 203-4]
The influence of Dante’s Divine Comedy is not so obvious, yet I think that it is perfectly demonstrable…. Thus there are three levels in Dante’s scheme of things: the Hell of the exterior world, the Purgatory of his own consciousness, and the Paradise of the supersensuous.
