"Ulysses" is the account of a unique day, June 16, 1904. The setting is specific, Dublin. A citizen of this city, Leopold Bloom, wakes up in the morning and leaves for his work. His social, professional, and emotional obligations delay his return until the early hours of the next day.
This delay in returning is not the only similarity with his archaic prototype. Leopold Bloom goes through a series of adventures corresponding to those of Odysseus. The descent to Hades finds its counterpart in Bloom's visit to the cemetery, which he visits accompanying a friend who died unexpectedly to his final resting place. The island of Aeolus finds its counterpart in the offices of a newspaper, where all the winds blow. The Sirens are the girls in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, where Bloom retreats for a late meal and hears some friends singing with piano accompaniment from the adjacent room. The cave of the Cyclops is Barney Kiernan's bar, where a fanatic nationalist named Citizen frequents, proclaiming his intolerance towards anything non-Irish and causing a minor pogrom against Bloom, who is of Jewish descent. Circe is a brothel in the night city, which Bloom visits to help a half-dead young man he met earlier and feels a strong sense of paternal care for.
The action is minimal, but the "interior monologue" technique invented by the author for the exposition of his narrative allows him to comment with precision and detail on the entire web of relationships of the characters involved in this miniature epic. Middle-aged Mr. Bloom, as well as young Stephen Dedalus (who plays the role of the Homeric Telemachus), reconstruct and re-examine within their thoughts all the problems addressed by the Greek poet. The interest of the modern reader focuses both on the similarities of the myth and on its differences and subversions, which help in drawing conclusions firstly for a comparison of our world with the classical world and secondly for tracing the moral and spiritual course of our contemporary world in which we live.