Many Readers Buy into Their Conjectures. I Don't.

Molly Bloom is awake, her husband is asleep beside her, and the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses belongs to her. Penelope has a reputation as a torrent, and Molly has one of her own, in Dublin and in a good deal of criticism. Philip Kitcher suspects both come from reading her at the speed she thinks. He shows how one unpunctuated stretch changes meaning depending on where you pause, follows her pronouns as they pass from man to man, and asks what she makes of Blazes Boylan now that he has gone. Then he comes to her other men, and to a conclusion most readers have not reached.