Leopold Bloom Ulysses: "Reincarnation" Of The Hero

Ulysses, written by Irish modern writer James Joyce, is a theoretical fiction of rich connotation. In the research history of Ulysses, its secondary relationship with Homeric epic The Odyssey is a debatable issue. Joyce’s critics have two different ideas on his use of contrast between myth and reality. One believes that the structure of Homeric epic deeply influenced the novel Ulysses; while the other holds that it is no use of solving Ulysses’ mystery when we just explore the correspondence of allusions, structures and characters between the two works.The paper begins with the analysis of Leopold Bloom’s identity. In the exploration of "metempsychosis" I want to seek for Joyce’s inheritance and transcendence beyond Homer by the application of contemporary theory of author and text. Through substantive textual analysis and illustration I want to demonstrate how Joyce achieved the aesthetic effect by the strategy of textual "metempsychosis".In the first chapter the paper analyzes the artistic ways which can arouse referential illusions, such as weave-unweave strategy, dissimilation of narrator, loss of plot, rhetoric of silence and conspiracy between the narrator and the character. I conclude that there is no simple correspondence between Ulysses and The Odyssey and Bloom is not an antihero against Ulysses. Furthermore, I attempt to explore the deformation and drift of the text’s key word "metempsychosis" in the consciousness of Bloom’s. It is the word that makes the narration ambiguous, suggesting the character’s past life. Finally I draw a conclusion that Ulysses is not Bloom’s archetype, but his modern metempsychosis. Joycean metempsychosis aesthetics see the reading as a generative process; and the author experiences Barthes’"the death of author", becoming part of the text and deriving the significance from the interaction between the reader and the text.