The three central characters— Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser; and his wife, Molly —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 after the Trojan War.

‘Ulysses’ plays host to three principal characters, namely Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom. James Joyce uses these three characters to drive much of this modernist tale home, along with an eclectic band of adhoc characters.