Episode 17, "Ithaca," which shows Stephen and Bloom walking north from the vicinity of the Custom House to 7 Eccles Street, drinking cocoa together in the kitchen, and standing in the garden under the stars, corresponds to the part of Homer's poem in which Odysseus and Telemachus enter the palace and kill the suitors laying waste to their property. One of Joyce's schemas identifies the chapter's Technic as "Catechism (impersonal)" and the Organ as "Skeleton," and indeed it consists of an impersonal series of bare-bones questions and answers. Catechism is an instructional genre that has little to do with narrative, but here it becomes a device for following Stephen and Bloom, then Bloom alone, and finally Bloom and Molly, through a series of distinct scenes, detailing their actions, paraphrasing their words and thoughts, describing their surroundings, characterizing their states of mind, summarizing their histories, and assessing their significance. The questions and answers are coldly abstract, scrupulously logical, and precisely informative, and they clarify many mysteries of earlier chapters. But Ithaca is also parodic, playful, arbitrary, and whimsical. Sometimes it is even inscrutable, inaccurate, or perverse. Although it gives readers the intoxicating sense that all the questions raised by Joyce's big encyclopedic novel are finally being answered, it clearly is taking them for a ride—an exhilarating one.

Joyce told Frank Budgen that this was his favorite chapter, a preference which says much about its quality but may also reflect its having stemmed very directly from his educational training. Catholic catechisms indoctrinate young people in the tenets of their new faith via a long series of loaded questions and definitive answers, and Joyce had to memorize two of them before his tenth birthday. They are dull, elementary exercises, but in Joyce they whetted an appetite for more sophisticated question-and-answer discourses like Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica (aka Summa Theologiae) and Summa contra Gentiles, philosophical works which break down every important aspect of Catholic teaching into categories, subcategories, and subsubcategories, state the correct position on a given subject, consider the objections that can be made to it, and counter them with detailed replies. Joyce became a devotee. In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen refers to "Saint Thomas...whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original," and later in the chapter Mulligan mocks him for it: "I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore."

Although these Catholic rational habits clearly inform Joyce's method, Ithaca pointedly rejects the otherworldly premises of Catholicism in several allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy, and instead takes a quasi-scientific approach to very earthly subject matters. It makes sense, then, that in addition to his religious inspirations Joyce had a secular catechism in mind. Citing the work of two other scholars, A. Walton Litz observes (Critical Essays, 394) that the chapter is clearly indebted to Richmal Mangnall's Historical and Miscellaneous Questions, an encyclopedia-like textbook of history, biography, and science "for the use of young people." First published in 1798, this durable educational staple went through more than one hundred editions throughout the course of the 19th century. In part 1 of A Portrait of the Artist, as Stephen works up his courage to tell the rector about his unjust punishment, he thinks, "A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in the books of history. And the rector would declare that he had been wrongly punished because the senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been wrongly punished. Those were the great men whose names were in Richmal Magnall’s Questions."

The Questions take children's brief naive queries and flood them with information. Litz quotes this one:

    What are comets?
    Luminous and opaque bodies, whose motions are in different directions, and the orbits they describe very extensive; they have long translucent tails of light turned from the sun: the great swiftness of their motion in the neighbourhood of the sun, is the reason they appear to us for such a short time: and the great length of time they are in appearing again is occasioned by the extent and eccentricity of their orbits or paths in the heavens.

This professorial sentence could almost be mistaken for one of Joyce's in Ithaca. "There can be no doubt," Litz remarks, that Mangnall's work "was a primary source for Joyce's 'mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen'. To the modern adult reader it is filled with unconscious humour and grotesque distortions, but to the young Joyce it must have shimmered with the poetic magic of unfamiliar names and mysterious words (such as gnomon and simony)" (394). Running across such words, and running to a dictionary to look them up, is one of the great pleasures of reading Ithaca.

Both the church's theological discourses and Mangnall's historical and scientific tome must have appealed to Joyce's love of precise language and orderly rational categories, but to adopt their stolidly straightforward industriousness would have been intolerable. He found antidotes to the catechism's stultifying quality in playful caprices, unpredictable digressions, wry wit, and outright jokes. Ithaca is a sham catechism—pseudo-scientific, rationality on laughing gas. No less than any other late chapter in Ulysses, it is animated by an archly parodic spirit. Litz floats the interesting notion that it approaches "self-parody" (390, 395) by aping the author's own Jesuitical intellectual habits. There is a kind of escalatory logic to this. Cyclops mocks patriotic Irish male blather and Nausicaa mocks women's sentimental fiction. Oxen of the Sun sends up ten centuries of English literary prose, Circe explodes drama from the inside, and in Eumaeus the keys to the car are handed over to someone as lacking in literary skill as the novel's protagonist. After all this raising of stakes, why not shoot the moon by mocking the author himself?

But for all its self-referential hyper-rationality, Ithaca never abandons the spirit of naive openness that catechisms seek to foster in children's malleable minds, and it lays out its story in an reassuringly straightforward way. Narrative movement is conveyed through five clearly defined scenes. First Stephen and Bloom walk from the quays to Eccles Street, trying out a wide range of intellectual topics. Then a second long conversation—nearly half the chapter—is conducted in the kitchen as Bloom prepares and serves cocoa. More conversation occurs after the two men leave the house by the back door and stand in the garden under the stars. After Stephen leaves, a fourth section of the chapter follows Bloom as he reenters the house and spends some time alone in the parlor. Finally Bloom is in his bedroom, putting away clothes, climbing into bed with Molly, thinking about her as she sleeps, and engaging in conversation with her when she wakes up. In his early typescript drafts of the chapter, Joyce named these five scenes: "street," "kitchen," "garden," "parlour," "bedroom" (Litz, 398).

Ithaca delights in little logical puzzles that twist readers' brains into pretzels, but a greater part of its energy is devoted to the more straightforward business of cataloguing things: topics of conversation, sequences of actions, contents of rooms, contents of bookshelves, contents of desk drawers, articles of clothing, mechanics of water delivery, properties of water, astronomical phenomena, characteristics of penises, places in Ireland, places abroad, financial assets, credits and debits, daydreams of wealth, moneymaking schemes, events of the past day, plans for the future, possible bad ends to life, unsatisfactory conditions of embodiment, unsatisfactory conditions of marriage, reasons for divorcing, reasons for remaining married, strategies for achieving equanimity, stages of sexual attraction, things never quite understood—and on and on. These lists, some of them obsessively long, feel as comprehensive and as exhaustively detailed as Aquinas's analysis of theological problems, and they create a sense of epic scope not unlike the catalogues in Homer's Iliad.

But it is the Odyssey that Joyce's artistic architecture most overtly invokes, and as in all the other chapters readers must think about how to respond to the invitation. How little or how much of the epic's violent climax is echoed in the novel's story of coming home at the end of a humdrum day? How much or little does Joyce's everyman protagonist resemble Homer's extraordinary hero? How broadly or minutely, and how often or rarely, are intertextual connections insinuated? Joyce drops some very precise reminders of Homer's episode into his own. Stephen and Bloom constitute a "duumvirate" as they walk to the house on Eccles Street. Bloom employs "A stratagem" to get into it. Stephen helps Bloom "to close and chain the door." Bloom thinks of a "preceding series" of 24 men who came before Blazes Boylan, and he asks "What retribution, if any" should redress the violation of his matrimonial bed. But the answer to this question—"Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now...."—makes clear that modern Ireland is not archaic Greece, poor Bloom is not mighty Odysseus, and pacifist Joyce is not bloodsoaked Homer. 

Still, it seems certain that Joyce did not intend only faint ironic echoes of Homer's rousing climax. Ithaca is about regaining control—not through acts of savage violence, as in the Odyssey, but through mental mastery of life's insufficiencies. Bloom's efforts to achieve "equanimity" about a crisis in his marriage are as heroic in their small way as Odysseus's efforts to drive rival males out of his palace, and the chapter's serenely detached prose presents many other ways in which he rides out waves of worry, distrust, insecurity, hostility, jealousy, and sorrow. Turning on a tap elicits gratitude and wonder for the presence of water. Failing to have bet on a winning horse brings not disappointment but calm reflection. A viciously antisemitic song about broken windows prompts him only to reflect that his kitchen window remains unbroken. Intellectual frustrations with Molly end in deep physical satisfaction as he lies nestled in her backside. Fantastical dreams of sudden wealth help him get to sleep at night. Visions of a beautifully furnished house in the suburbs provide a mental landscape of fulfillment beyond each day's economic striving, just like the one that drives Odysseus on from island to island, back home to Ithaca.

If this response to the chapter is on target, then its strange pairing of epic triumph with schoolboy instruction—Joyce called it the "ugly ducking" of the novel—is not an awkward mismatch but a metaphysical conceit worthy of John Donne. All of Ulysses allegorizes Homer's epic as a journey of the human mind. Ithaca consummates this reinterpretation, ending the saga of sadness, alienation, and longing on a note of intellectual mastery.

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