Not One of the Boys

Five o'clock, a pub on Little Britain Street, and a drink Leopold Bloom will not accept. Cyclops, the twelfth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, is told by a barfly who despises him, and Philip Kitcher watches a careful man get everything wrong in it: he takes a cigar instead of a pint, lectures the bar on hanging, and lets slip one word that says what he is thinking about. The reason, Kitcher argues, is not in this pub at all. Then the citizen asks Bloom what his nation is, and the quarrel that follows ends on a word the room sneers at. Kitcher has a different name for it.