WTF

Okay, I admire the craft and the use of different forms, dialects, styles, but I felt that in the Oxen of the sun episode the speaker and point of view was constantly misplaced within the general drunkenness of the characters, the changing tone of the sections and the settings. For one thing, why were Stephen and his friends drinking at the maternity ward with Bloom? And secondly why does Bloom feel the need to go check on Purefoy but then only get drunk with a bunch of young men that continuously unwittingly and, perhaps sometimes intentionally, slap him in the face with his predicament and troubles?

But besides my general frustration with this section, there are many lovely and insightful sections that explicitly state Bloom's heroic qualities, plight, and outline the sort of morality, debased, religious and otherwise, that he is surrounded by. The conversation on whether a woman who will die by childbirth should be saved and the child given up or vise versa, is somewhat settled by Stephen who argues that woman is naught but a vessel for the eternal or holy mothers gift of life and it is the female duty to bring babies into the world and that women are meant to suffer for this because of the first mothers (Eve's) sin. Then they get into a discussion based on a question by Bloom about who is more important for the birth of male children. This however, is somewhat overlooked by the company and there begins a discussion of the soul. That is reared by the church and in the course of their discussion it is feminized and we hear undertones of the idea of how long it takes for a baby to begin having a soul.

On the tail end of this Buck Mulligan enters and announces that he is going to impregnate women who are married to people like Bloom. People who cannot give them healthy children or who do not have sex with them. I found it interesting that at this point the prostate is compared to the uterus and we see that in subtle ways the conversation is growing towards who is responsible for birth and birth complications. In a way all this ties into the idea of the Oxen of the sun in that Oxen are known for virility and yet in Ireland at the time the cattle is dying and uneatable due to disease. In a very explicit way this makes Ireland into the island where Odysseus' men meet their downfall by trying to eat the cattle to satisfy their hunger, what for these characters would be thirst (for alcohol and sex). Which it seems on page 396 are afraid of- the result of their lust, namely children, and they seem to find themselves each a figure of Adam, someone who has or could be brought low by woman. In a way Bloom's son becomes a symbol for the mistake made by being foreign and satisfying your hunger for the meat of the soil you are on. On page 409, Bloom is dismissed as not being to preach to the young men since he is not Irish and it is stated that he was wrong for marrying and having children with Molly, and that this is why his son died, and it's ghost like the ghosts of the cattle will haunt him forever.

Then again Bloom becomes the father of all these men on page 413 and perhaps the one who will win in the end ("But in the straight on the run home when all were in close order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her." 415), and then once again is shot down by Stephen when he claims that Bloom's son is dead because of survival of the fittest 419.

A lot of other subtle and complicating things are written here enhancing the plethora of themes running throughout the book. However I would like to say how the different styles employed by Joyce here are enhancing the book. Well, I would like to say I don't really know how, but the line that stuck out to me was in the praise of Theodore Purefoy after his son is born by his wife how has given birth to a lot of children: "Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle." 423. Here I felt, Joyce described himself and this novel. He has combines and formed a whole out of various materials/ styles in his chronicle which is pretty inclusive, if not all.