Themes in Ulysses

One of the things I was reading the other day was an article on the main thematic points of the book. The article basically narrows it down to four main areas: 1) Late 18th and early 19th century Irish politics, especially in relation to the question of Home Rule 2) Catholicism and the Catholic church 3) Isolationism and 4) Love. It’s interesting to think about how these overlap and intertwine in the book and, since reading this article, I have been consciously “on the lookout” for items related to these four meta-themes. References to these themes are everywhere (this is not surprising of course, these are what themes “do” after all), and are both obvious and obscure. Personally, I would add a few (Commerce and Money, for example) but I think that these four are definitely solid choices, especially the theme if isolationism. I was thinking about how this theme is played out via Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing style. If this particular writing technique does anything, it supports the theme of isolationism. Following the inner workings of the consciousness, the inner thoughts and desires of the individual, pretty much embodies the very idea of individual isolationism. These moments are wholly and completely our own, and even our best efforts at articulating them to others cannot make them anything more than secondhand. We are, for better of for worse, isolated in this way, we are our own islands of thought, and Joyce works through this idea in a really interesting way via his stream-of-consciousness style.