> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What Is Ulysses About? Kitcher on the Proliferation of Perspectives - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-proliferation-of-perspectives/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:21.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T21:07:25.000Z - Description: Ulysses is about the proliferation of perspectives, Kitcher argues — a Nietzschean revaluation of values that makes an advertising canvasser a Homeric hero. - Author: John Kaag - Tags: Philip Kitcher on James Joyce's Ulysses, #context Ask what James Joyce's *Ulysses* is "about" and you get the usual answers: one day in Dublin, a man named Bloom, the Odyssey retold. In his Rebind Classics reading, Philip Kitcher offers a deeper answer, an idea he argues runs through the entire book. The novel is not a single lens on a single day; it is a device for multiplying viewpoints, and its real subject is what Kitcher calls [the proliferation of perspectives](https://www.rebindclassics.com/a-proliferation-of-perspectives/). Kitcher roots this in a philosophical project he sees Joyce pursuing. "Joyce, I suggest, is committed to a [Nietzschean project: the revaluation of values](https://www.rebindclassics.com/friedrich-nietzsches-thus-spoke-zarathustra-episode-1/)," he writes. The aim is to get readers "to revisit and question the value judgments they characteristically make." But Joyce is gentler than Nietzsche. He "will not insist that they break with the evaluations they have previously endorsed"; rather, he "expands perspectives on everyday phenomena and events" in the hope that the reader, given new angles, will reassess. The reader may end up where they began, Kitcher notes, or "may also deviate radically." Either way, the book has done its work. ## **Wandering Rocks: How Joyce Teaches Us to Read** The clearest laboratory for this machine is [the tenth episode, Wandering Rocks](https://www.rebindclassics.com/full-of-tricks-and-traps/), at the novel's midpoint. The wandering rocks of the Odyssey, Kitcher explains, "make navigation difficult," and Joyce's chapter does the same to the reader, lacing the text with "pseudo-connections" and false leads. A reference seems to link two characters, and the link turns out to be a trap. The point is not to humiliate the reader. "Joyce is again teaching us how to read," Kitcher argues, training us to ask what genuine connection underlies an apparent one, and so "to think in unconventional ways about events we take for granted." ## **No Single Correct Way of Structuring the World** Behind the literary technique sits a real philosophical claim, and Kitcher does not soften it. The question is whether the world has a single correct structure, what philosophers call carving nature at its joints. Kitcher is skeptical. "What is difficult to maintain, I believe, is that there is a single correct way of structuring our world," he writes. Different creatures inhabit different worlds, and so do humans in different eras: "our values and our goals evolve, and, as they do so, we reconstruct the world of experience." A perspective is a way of deciding which connections matter, and there is no master perspective that ranks all the others. The danger the novel dramatizes is what happens when one perspective hardens into the only one. That is the meaning Kitcher draws from [the Cyclops episode](https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-the-citizen-and-the-biscuit-tin/). "Unless we assimilate our experience through multiple perspectives," he warns, "we risk becoming one-eyed, that is Cyclopean, trapped in a view that excludes things we would find important if we could only be made aware of them." The men in the pub see everything through a single fixed lens; Bloom, who keeps trying to imagine his way into other people's situations, is "[the least Cyclopean](https://www.rebindclassics.com/antisemitism-belonging-ulysses/)" figure in the room. The novel's ethics and its form are the same thing. Free account Read more with a free account. - The opening films of every book, with its guide - More essays open to you on the site - Listen In: minutes from every audio series - The Rebind newsletter, every couple of weeks Join free → Check your inbox for a sign-in link. Something went wrong. Please try again. Want everything? [$90 a year, every episode, film and essay →](#/portal/signup) ## **From Stephen and Bloom to a Democracy of Perspectives** Kitcher shows that Joyce's perspectivism grows more radical as the book proceeds. Early on, "we begin by learning to see a society through [the eyes of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom](https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-interior-monologue-kitcher/)," and we end "by appreciating [Molly Bloom's distinctive vision](https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-mollys-word-is-yes/)." But in the second half, Joyce goes further, unfolding "perspectives on the events of the novel beyond those adopted by any actual character." The strange styles of the later episodes become "vehicles for viewing those happenings from some independent standpoint," and the reader is invited "to become co-creators with the novelist," bringing their own experience to find new angles. There is a democratic implication Kitcher draws out, too. When Wandering Rocks pulls back to show Bloom and Stephen as small figures among many in the city, the novel implies "an immense number of alternatives to *Ulysses*," books that might trace the inner lives of anyone at all. Joyce chose Bloom, Stephen, and Molly not because they are powerful but because they "have lost their way, and are trying to work out a direction for themselves." They are, in Kitcher's phrase, "ordinary, and yet extraordinary," and the extraordinary shows up in their interior lives. So what is *Ulysses* about? In Kitcher's reading, it is about learning to see, and to keep seeing in more than one way. The retold Odyssey, the single Dublin day, the wandering rocks and the one-eyed pub: all of it serves a single ambition, to multiply the perspectives a reader can hold, and through that multiplication "to see an apparently ordinary man, [the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom](https://www.rebindclassics.com/who-is-leopold-bloom/), as a version of a Homeric hero."