Ulysses
- Modern Library 100 Best Novels — No. 1 (1998 board list)
Classic
Literary Fiction
Cerebral
Long Commitment
Divisive
Classic LiteratureThe review
Few works have reshaped their medium as completely as this one. It is treated, a century on, as the demonstration and summation of modernist fiction — the book that turned the movement's experiments into a masterpiece, expanding what a novel could do in a way that permanently changed the form. The headline innovation is stream of consciousness, but the deeper one is the sheer stylistic range: each of its eighteen episodes adopts a radically different mode, from catechism to newspaper parody to musical structure, so that the prose itself becomes the subject. It takes one ordinary day in Dublin and builds from it an epic in which Homer's Odyssey is merely the scaffolding for the lives of an advertising canvasser, a restless young intellectual, and a singer whose closing soliloquy is among the most celebrated passages in English literature. Critics consistently emphasize the warmth and the humor at the book's core, and its protagonist is widely regarded as one of the great humane creations in fiction — the everyday man elevated to the heroic without losing his ordinariness.
The difficulty is inseparable from the achievement, and it is the book's most consistent weakness as much as its signature. The allusiveness is relentless — classical, theological, historical, and saturated in Dublin's local detail — and the stylistic experiments deliberately refuse to make reading comfortable. Between the parodies, the headlines, and a final stretch that abandons punctuation almost entirely, most readers need annotations, guides, and at least a second pass; even admirers describe stretches as grueling. The most common complaint from those who abandon it is that there is barely a plot to hold onto, and that the pacing feels glacial. A smaller but vocal camp calls the whole enterprise pretentious — a charge the book's devotees tend to meet with bemusement rather than agreement.
The disagreement that actually defines the work's reception is not about quality but about accessibility: critics are as close to unanimous as literary judgment ever gets on its stature, while readers split sharply, and both sides have a point. It can be a lifelong companion or an unreadable obligation depending on the reader and the season of life they encounter it in. Its themes are the texture of a whole city, the interiority of ordinary consciousness, and the gap between public respectability and private reality, handled with a frankness that made it notorious — episodes were suppressed and burned before the book even appeared in print, and it was legally cleared of obscenity in the United States only after a landmark 1930s ruling. That fusion of immense reputation and immense difficulty is exactly why it remains a living, contested classic rather than a settled monument.
By the same author
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)Who it's for
Readers with a serious appetite for literary experimentation and modernism; puzzle-solvers who enjoy wrestling with dense allusion, ideally with a good annotation guide as a companion; patient readers who don't mind rereading — the book famously rewards every return; anyone who loved A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and wants to follow Stephen Dedalus further; readers who appreciate that high art can be outrageously funny. Lovers of Dublin and Irish cultural history will find the city itself a character — and June 16th, Bloomsday, is a global tradition of readings and celebrations that a new reader can join the moment they finish. Audiobook listeners have a famously celebrated recording as an accessible way in. And anyone curious about where 20th-century fiction came from: if you like almost any novel written after 1922, much of its DNA is here.
Who it's not for
Readers who need plot momentum and narrative payoff — the book has close to none in the conventional sense. Anyone looking for a relaxing or quick read; readers who dislike deliberate ambiguity, withheld meaning, or being made to work; those with limited reading time who will feel guilty setting it aside — it demands sustained commitment. Readers sensitive to frank sexual content, era-accurate anti-Semitic slurs, heavy drinking, or bodily-function humor should know what they're walking into. And the "I should read it to say I did" camp in particular: approaching it as an obligation is the most reliable way to hate it. — Explicit sexual content · Depicted anti-Semitism (era-accurate slurs) · Heavy alcohol use · Scatological humor · Religious irreverence / blasphemy · Bleak/depressive undertones
Birds of a feather...
- BookMimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)
Ulysses is one of Auerbach's central case studies and arguably the culmination of his argument: the elevation of ordinary, everyday life to the highest seriousness of literature. Reading Joyce after Auerbach means watching his historicist claims come to life in the very text he used to close his survey.
92% - MusicRevolver (1966)
Both treat formal experimentation as the message: Ulysses remakes narrative style every episode, while Revolver uses the studio as a compositional instrument to push past pop conventions. Each rewards patience and active listening, exploring isolation, interiority, and the limits of their medium with a productive, intentional disorientation.
75% - BookKin (2026)
Both are deeply interior literary works that elevate ordinary, marginalized lives to epic significance. Ulysses maps a Dublin day onto Homer; Kin tracks generations of kinship under systemic constraint. Both use restraint and emotional archaeology rather than plot velocity, and demand patience for the granular textures of grief, identity, and connection.
70% - TVAdventure Time (2010)
Ulysses and Adventure Time both move fluidly between absurd comedy and devastating melancholy, using tonal whiplash as a deliberate strategy. Each is self-conscious about narrative construction, plays with form across episodes, and circles themes of identity, memory, and impermanence, ultimately valuing the connections we forge amid change.
68% - MusicNATURE IS HEALING (2026)
Both works are defined by unresolved irony/sincerity and genre-switching as formal method. Ulysses parodies and pastiches styles across episodes; the album collides wellness rhetoric with maximalist club music, staging ambiguity between genuine feeling and arch play. Each makes the medium itself the subject and demands comfort holding contradictory registers at once.
66% - MusicPet Sounds (1966)
Pet Sounds shares Ulysses's project of elevating the ordinary to artistic grandeur by pouring obsessive craft into a humble form. Both are landmark works where the studio or pen becomes the instrument, layering complex emotional textures beneath accessible surfaces, and making the album or novel a unified statement about longing, loss, and unattainable connection.
62% - BookCool Machine (2026)
Both are ambitious novels centered on an outsider navigating a city in flux, with formal structure as a vehicle for deeper social reflection. Ulysses uses one day and Homeric parallels; Cool Machine uses a three-part structure and heist machinery. Each blends social critique with quiet empathy for a protagonist living between multiple worlds, examining legacy and duality.
60% - MusicWith Heaven on Top (2026)
Both works embrace sprawl and contradiction rather than tidy arcs, letting contradictory emotional states sit side by side unresolved. Ulysses floods a single day with the textures of thought and memory; the album empties a life onto tape, refusing catharsis and finding grace amid chaos. Each values process over polish and the unglamorous texture of living.
52%