The dead are welcomed into Glasnevin Cemetery by assistant to the undertaker H. As the carriage crosses the Royal Canal, Bloom spots “a man stood on his dropping barge, between clamps of turf.” Another Charon. The florin is reminiscent of the obol coin placed over the eyes of the dead in ancient Greece to pay Charon’s toll into the underworld. Dodd, who paid a boatman a measly florin for the trouble of fishing his son out of the Liffey with a pole. In Dublin, there are many such psychopomps guiding the men on their journey. Souls were transported across the water in ancient Greece by the phantasmal ferryman Charon. Just as one must cross four rivers (Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Phlegethon) to enter the Greek underworld, Dignam’s funeral procession must cross four waterways between Sandymount and Glasnevin - the rivers Liffey and Dodder, the Grand Canal, and the Royal Canal. It’s particularly insightful that Joyce portrayed the alcoholic’s husband as Sisyphus, showing the futility of his attempts to mitigate the effects of her drinking and spending rather than trying to strike directly at the underlying problem. Cunningham has every right to be embittered like Simon, but he maintains an outward grace. It speaks greatly to Cunningham’s character that he shows such warmth to his peers, particularly with regards to Bloom’s father’s suicide. Always a good word to say.”įor all his decency, Cunningham is married to an alcoholic wife who pawns their furniture every Saturday, requiring her husband to repeatedly re-furnish their home.
Cunningham is the most empathetic of the group, a gentle foil to Simon’s irascibility and sarcasm. While in the Underworld, Odysseus observes Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it always roll back down just before it reaches the top. Jack Power, Stephen’s sharp-witted father Simon Dedalus, and Dublin’s own Sisyphus, Martin Cunningham. A lot of money he spent colouring it.”īloom shares a carriage with Mr. Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. Stuart Gilbert notes in Ulysses: A Study that Victor Bérard believed that Elpenor’s name came from the Semitic root El-penor, meaning “the blazing face.” Indeed, notice Bloom’s description of Dignam: Similarly, Dignam, nestled in his coffin, arrives at Glasnevin Cemetery before Bloom and the rest of the funeral cortege.
Elpenor has arrived in the land of the dead ahead of Odysseus and is the first ghost Odysseus meets there. Dignam’s parallel in The Odyssey is Elpenor, one of Odysseus’ crew who over-imbibed and fell to his death from the roof of Circe’s palace. The theme of booze-soaked tragedy runs throughout the works of Joyce, but at least in this case, it also has an ancient root. Let’s start with Paddy Dignam, Bloom’s friend whose funeral is at the center of “Hades.” Dignam’s sudden and tragic death is attributed throughout the book to heart failure or to “apoplexy,” but it seems those who knew him know the real cause - alcoholism. And just as Bloom is a sideways version of Odysseus, the other attendees at poor Dignam’s funeral are all sideways versions of various characters from ancient Greece. While the company Bloom keeps may not be as illustrious as the gods and heroes Odysseus encounters, this is the first time we see Bloom interacting with his peers in a meaningful way. The Homeric parallels of “Hades”are overt and abundant, with Glasnevin Cemetery as a clear stand-in for The Odyssey’s mythical underworld. Bloom wasn’t close to Dignam, and it seems he wasn’t particularly close to the other men he shares a carriage ride with, though they are clearly all from the same social circle. In “Hades,” the sixth episode of Ulysses, Bloom and his peers travel across Dublin, from Sandymount in the southeast to Glasnevin in the north, to attend the funeral of their friend Paddy Dignam.
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