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Comparing Homers Odyssey and Joyces Ulysses This essay will analyze the style, genre and plots of the Hades episodes found in Homers Odyssey and Joyces Ulysses. Before entering this small treatise, it is important to understand the etymology of the word Hades, since it is the setting for both Joyce and Homer (of course in Homers case, he was speaking of the literal aidhs and Joyce was referring to the graveyard, where Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam and broods about the death of his only son ). Homers use of the word Hades was to refer to the abode of the dead or the unseen nether world; where we find Odysseus searching for Tiresias, to find out how to return to Ithaca safely. The Homeric Hades†¦show more content†¦With Homer, we find narration (when needed), good sentence structure, understandable plots, proverbial wisdom, Greek history, Greek mythology, and true heroines. In Joyce, we dont find an omniscient narrator; nor a consistent sentence structure but rather a stream of consciousness; we dont re ally find a clear plot; we dont have any true heroines as defined by the standards of the Western world because the two main characters (Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus) dont accomplish any feats or beat any obstacles in the nineteen hours Joyce gives them . Among the eighteen episodes in Ulysses, little happens; however, in the eighteen episodes of the Odyssey, adventure is at its best, as far as Greek literature is concerned. Its funny though, even though Joyces writing is cluttered with streams of consciousnelss there is an ironic structure that can only be understood while wearing the spectacles of Homer. In Joyces Voices, Kenner, professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, writes that Joyce was Homers scrupulous apprentice. It was Homer, weve seen, who held his wild book together . If we are to find any structure whatsoever, we must look to Homer, for only in Homer will we find salvation in Joyce. Joyce, much like Hegel and Nietzsche, helped father existentialism in the literary world. Just as Picassos synthetic cubism changed the art worldso Joyce shaped the twentieth century literary world