While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, Homer would have probably been none too amused by James Joyce's classic 1922 novel, Ulysses. Mockingly modeled after Homer's epic poem, Odyssey, it is the 24-hour 'odyssey' of aspiring young writer Stephen Dedalus and an aging advertising huckster, Leopold Bloom, who are unknowingly in search of each other, just as father and son were in the poem. Leopold Bloom continues to both fascinate and infuriate readers with his vulgarity, which is the antithesis of any Homeric hero, who wear their character like a badge of honor. For years, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether Bloom is a literary hero or if he is the embodiment of the anti-hero. When he is first introduced in Chapter 4, "Calypso," his gluttony is readily apparent: "MR. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine" (Joyce 45). This is hardly the description of a swashbuckling, heroic warrior that dominated ancient Greek poetic epics. But Leopold Bloom is a complex character, which makes him, perhaps, one of the most compelling and human of all twentieth-century literary protagonists. He is a Jew living in Catholic Dublin. No matter how many Guinness ales he swills or how many barroom brawls he engages in, in the name of patriotism, Leopold Bloom is treated like an outsider. Certainly, his eating habits resemble that of a pig and his greed and vulgarisms resemble those of the money-lending Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In the pivotal Chapter 12, "Cyclops," Bloom seems to show himself at his least heroic -- attempting to use his business savvy to defraud a man of money to which he was owed. But is Leopold Bloom really a calculating lout, or is he merely parodying...
