James Joyce

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom emerges as one of the greatest Irish characters, a temporally indomitable rebel who shatters the regular chronology and enters into the self-created heterogeneous world for the sake of challenging Irish nationalistic sacredness. The multiple characteristics of Leopold’s subjective perception of time directs us to Alain Badiou’s distinctive ontological reading, in which he proposes the term void as an ignored ontological heterogeneity triggered by the state’s monolithic structuration. By localizing the void under the name of the event, the required condition will be prepared for the eligible subject, namely, a rebel to engage idiosyncrasy in hope of changing a future that is still in the formation. By examining Ulysses, this article explores the ways in which Leopold’s mind embraces a plethora of immediate impressions in the form of failed inconsistencies that can be used as a personal artifact in social context laden with anti-colonial sentiments to first, provide self-created truths, and then reexamine structured situations at the sudden moment of excess, bracing itself for new causal events. Moreover, the article examines miscellaneous, pithy insignificant events as narratorial tropes cast across the spatial-temporal plane of Ulysses, diverging the narrative from linear narration, and at the same time distracting the character from approximating their centrality.

story from Dubliners has received immense critical reception over the years and has been studied through various critical frameworks. However, its potential for analysis based on Hegelian dialectic has been largely overlooked. Considering the last episode of the story as a moment of epiphany and self-realization, the study seeks to discuss how the protagonist’s development of consciousness can be interpreted based on the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: Understanding (Idealization of Mangan's sister and the bazaar), Dialectical (faced with contradiction at the bazaar), and Speculative (the final epiphany). The analysis demonstrates how the narrator’s initially fixed determinations and alienated consciousness in the understanding stage face their contradiction at the dialectical moment, resulting in the final epiphany, which mirrors the last stage of the dialectic where contradictions are resolved and self-realization is achieved. Further, based on the principles of Hegelian dialectic rooted in philosophical idealism, the study not only asserts that the narrator’s consciousness evolves through a process driven by contradiction, but it also interprets the narrator’s journey from naïve idealization to self-realization as a universal process of maturation. To avoid a mechanical and rigid application of the dialectical method, the analysis relies on close textual reading to identify the elements that contribute to each moment of the dialectic and deeply contextualizes the argument to deviate from oversimplification of the text.