The Accusing Voices

It is past ten in the Holles Street maternity hospital, the baby has finally come, and the medical students in James Joyce's Ulysses are drunk enough to be cruel. Oxen of the Sun, the fourteenth episode, spends its second half passing judgment on Leopold Bloom in a dozen borrowed voices, and Philip Kitcher reads the charges one by one: a cool appraisal, a prosecutor's indictment that reaches into the marriage bed, and then a paragraph in the voice of John Henry Newman that does something no other voice attempts. Kitcher thinks the whole chapter turns on it. The night ends on the street, with Bloom choosing which way to walk.