Why Hades Repays Careful Reading

A funeral carriage stalls behind a drove of cattle, and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom suggests to the mourners that Dublin ought to carry its dead to Glasnevin by tram. This is the last visit to Hades, the sixth episode of Ulysses, and Philip Kitcher is in no hurry to leave it. He follows Bloom through the carriage talk, the private thoughts among the graves, and out past the gate, watching a man who refuses every consolation and is moved all the same. Then he takes up the question the chapter invites: why linger over prose this plain? His answer reaches a long way into the rest of the book.