The Citizen and the Biscuit Tin

It is five o'clock, and Philip Kitcher takes you into another tavern. Leopold Bloom has been roped in by Martin Cunningham to help with a dubious insurance scheme for the Dignams, and is due to meet Cunningham and Jack Power at Barney Kiernan's. Holding court in the corner, with an aggressive dog, is a militant Irish nationalist known as the Citizen. The story is told by a splenetic, bilious Irishman with a bad word for everybody.

Bloom does not want to come in and does not want to drink. He has Boylan on his mind. Antisemitism runs rife in the bar, he is taken for a Jew, and he is accused of having won money on the day's race when most of the others have lost. The dislike that showed in the funeral carriage comes fully into the open. When Bloom drives off, the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin after the car, is blinded by the sun, and misses. Here, Kitcher says, the Homeric parallel is very good: the Citizen is the Cyclops whom Ulysses blinds, and the boulder he throws after Odysseus's ship goes wide for the same reason.

Kitcher closes with the one thing that complicates an otherwise easy and very funny episode: the narrator's story keeps getting interrupted by long passages in other styles, among them a list of honorary Irishmen that starts with genuine Irishmen and then mixes in lots of others.