Molly's Word Is Yes

Molly Bloom has been at the center of the whole novel without saying a word. In its last episode she speaks, and Philip Kitcher follows the flow of it: pages of unbroken thought about the day, her life, and the men in it. Her word, the way "because" was Gerty's, is "yes," and what she is saying yes to is often far from clear. She uses "he" so freely that the men blur into one another, and she rates them on three counts: sex, children, and company.

On company, Leopold Bloom does well, and Kitcher sets out what Molly makes of him, of Blazes Boylan, and of a half-remembered soldier named Gardner. He points out two facts the book has quietly supplied. Bloom, whom everyone takes for a Jew, had a mother who was not Jewish; Molly, taken for the all-Irish girl, had a Spanish Jewish one.

Then Kitcher reads the ending. First Molly's own version of the proposal on Howth Head, among the rhododendrons, with the seedcake and the long kiss. Then the last page, which begins in Gibraltar under the Moorish wall with Mulvey and ends on Howth with Bloom. Kitcher's point is that the two men fuse in her memory, the two loves of her life joined in one yes.