The Interior Monologue: How Joyce Puts You Inside Stephen, Bloom, and Molly

The single most famous technical achievement of Ulysses is the interior monologue, the device that pulls the reader inside a character's mind and stays there. In his Rebind Classics reading, Philip Kitcher treats this technique not as a gimmick but as the engine of everything the novel does, the means by which James Joyce makes three very different consciousnesses "immediately open to us." Understanding how it works is, for Kitcher, the key to reading the book at all.

Kitcher traces the technique back before Ulysses, to its origins in Joyce's earlier work. The method, he notes, first appears in a single sentence of "The Dead," the last story of Dubliners: "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet." These, Kitcher observes, "are not the words of some objective narrator," because Lily "was not literally run off her feet." They are her own words, the phrase she would use, and "for a moment we enter Lily's world, and see the occasion from her point of view." The whole vast architecture of Ulysses grows from that small, quiet innovation.