At the Frontiers of Narrative: James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a fictional text that dismantles the classical constituent elements of ‘narration’ and ‘narrator.’ For this reason, the (pre-)structuralist theoretical premise that narrative representation is stable and determined calls for a radical rethinking. As the brief and telescopic examination of different episodes attempts to show, the novel particularly disrupts the traditional commanding role of the narrator in three different ways. The opening chapters replace the narrator, albeit he is still residually present in a number of passages, with a compound of free indirect thought and selfsustaining textual organisation. In chapters 12, 13 and 16, different types of narrators are introduced, and explicitly parodied. Finally, drama, question-and-answer catechism and interior monologue displace the diegetic mode. This iconoclastic undermining and generic undoing of familiar, recognisable models raises epistemological doubt about the substantiality of narrating and the narrator. Formal categories such as ‘arranger,’ ‘interpolator’ and ‘superordinate narrator’ appear to be redundant. The focus is on both the creative instance of the text-producing writer and the (represented and actual) readertext relationship. Decentring the subjective authority of the Realist and Romantic narrator the text also fragments a coherent master-narrative. On the cognitive level, the employment of particular narrative and non-narrative modes imparts to the reader that any practice aiming to produce correct narrative discourses, free of contradictions, is unattainable. In this way, Ulysses leads us to assess fictional, political and cultural narrative practices known to us