In Chapter Five, Bloom walks through the streets of Dublin and performs several errands. In Chapter Six, Bloom and his fellow mourners travel to the cemetery for the burial of Paddy Dignam, which evokes from Bloom a wealth of meditations on birth, death, and human frailty, including his reminiscences on Rudy, his own dead son, and his father, a suicide. This theme and anti-Semitism, tactlessly arise in various conversations, with Bloom the target.
In Chapter Seven, Stephen and Bloom (father and son, or Odysseus and Telemachus) meet in the newspaper office for the first time in the novel, although each knows who the other is. Bloom attempts (unsuccessfully) to complete an advertising contract, and Stephen (successfully) hands over the letter schoolmaster Deasy entrusted him with. Note the shift in narrative as newspaper headlines appear to interrupt straightforward narrative.
In Chapter Eight, Bloom gets hungry and decides to lunch at Davey Byrnes's pub. The dominant motifs are related to food and eating. Bloom continues to wander, thinking about birth and family life, Molly, her previous lovers, and his own past. He is handed a religious pamphlet, sees Stephen's sister Dilly in the street, feeds some seagulls with cakes he has purchased, then starts noticing and thinking about advertising. Bloom meets Mrs. Breen, sort of an old flame, and sympathizes with her because of her "cracked" husband. (He had earlier sympathized with women's lot in general when thinking about families — "Life with hard labor.") He learns that a mutual acquaintance, Mrs. Purefoy, is in the maternity hospital.
In Chapter Nine, at the National Library, in the office of the director, Stephen, A.E. (the pseudonym of noted Irish man of letters, George Russell), John Eglinton, and Lyster the librarian discuss Shakespeare. The others mock Stephen for his youthful enthusiasm for complex theories of literary creation. A.E. is a Platonist (an idealist), and mocks all readings of Shakespeare that suppose that Hamlet is a real person. After some banter about the Dublin literati, A.E. leaves and Stephen begins to expound his theory (it is a theory that must chart a course between the idealism of A.E. and the simple-minded, literal approach of Mulligan in order to define the ways in which art [the ideal] and life [the material] interact).
