The three central characters— Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser; and his wife, Molly Bloom, a professional singer—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses (Odysseus), and Penelope, respectively, and the events of the novel loosely parallel the major events in Odysseus’s journey home...