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424 The twentieth century: 1900–45<br />

There is some overlap between the narrator’s voice and the<br />

character’s voice and the same concentration on Bloom’s interior<br />

monologue. The movement of the prose is, however, more staccato<br />

and less poetic in rhythm and imagery. In linguistic terms, the<br />

fragmentation of narration is often represented by unusual cohesion,<br />

or changes in the normal ways of linking sentences, paragraphs, and<br />

narration. This leads to unusual jumps, juxtapositions, and connections,<br />

often also marked by unusual or missing punctuation, which can<br />

create unexpected visual or graphological effects on the page. Stream<br />

of consciousness takes these effects to extremes, often abandoning<br />

cohesion, syntax, and punctuation and lexical correctness which<br />

previously brought order and clarity to narration. Much modern writing<br />

has continued these linguistic experiments introduced in the 1920s.<br />

The world recorded here reflects the presence of the everyday in<br />

Bloom’s consciousness. It is in keeping with the character of Bloom<br />

himself who is portrayed as an ordinary, average man, most of whose<br />

thoughts tend to be about the immediate world around him. Bloom’s<br />

stream of consciousness is made up of strange, inconsequential<br />

associations. Memories are prompted, unusual ideas connected, playful<br />

links created between words of similar sound or meaning. The style is<br />

kaleidoscopic and the language often ungrammatical, but rules are<br />

broken in order to represent the workings of Bloom’s mind.<br />

In other parts of Ulysses, Joyce’s experiments with language are even<br />

more innovative and experimental. Here is an extract from the famous<br />

interior monologue of Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife, which occurs<br />

at the end of the novel. It is at the end of the day (the novel describes<br />

one day in the life of the characters in June 1904), and Molly Bloom is<br />

lying in bed, half-awake and half-asleep. Molly’s monologue lasts for<br />

almost fifty pages and is totally without punctuation:<br />

what shall I wear shall I wear a white rose those cakes in Liptons<br />

I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a pound or the other<br />

ones with cherries in them of course a nice plant for the middle<br />

of the table I love flowers Id love to have the whole place<br />

swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the<br />

wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing –<br />

The stream of consciousness here is in a freer, looser style and captures

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