This episode begins at 2:55 p.m. and ends at 4:00 p.m. It describes the wanderings of several characters from Ulysses around the streets of Dublin, and thus it forms a mini-odyssey, a microcosm of Joyce's novel. The chapter consists of 19 short episodes which mirror the overall 18-part structure of Ulysses (early critics usually described "The Wandering Rocks" as consisting of 18 parts and a final coda, the description of the viceregal cavalcade). Coming as it does after the first nine sections of Ulysses (traditionally accepted to be the first "half" of the novel), "The Wandering Rocks" is a kind of interlude — much like the comic entrance of Buck Mulligan during Stephen Dedalus's discussion of Shakespeare in "Scylla and Charybdis" — before Joyce begins the second "half' of the novel.
The chapter is almost perfectly balanced: the meanderings of Father Conmee, S. J., the amiable, patronizing former rector of Clongowes (who once saved Stephen from a painful punishment in A Portrait) begin the episode, and the cavalcade of the amiable, patronizing William Humble Ward, Second Earl of Dudley as he travels to open the Mirus Bazaar ends the chapter. The two men represent Ireland's bondage to two key foreign powers — the Roman Catholic Church and Britain — and all of the smaller odysseys in the episode are directly related to these two major structuring devices. Also, it is in the middle section (the tenth section) of "The Wandering Rocks" that Bloom rents Sweets of Sin for Molly. Finally, this near-central chapter of Ulysses is tied together by scores of motifs, gestures, thoughts, and cross-references. Joyce apparently wrote "The Wandering Rocks" with a map of Dublin before him, and modern Joyceans take great delight in timing the various wanderings of the participants, one critic going so far as to limp along the Dublin streets, miming the one-legged sailor; he discovered that Joyce was unusually accurate in his time sequences.
Parallels with Homer's Odyssey are especially clear in this chapter. In Homer, Circe told Odysseus that to return home he must sail either through the large, moving ("wandering") rocks or else he must pass between Scylla and Charybdis. Because only the mythological Jason of the Argonauts had succeeded in negotiating the rocks, Odysseus chose to battle Charybdis, the whirlpool, and Scylla, the six-headed monster.
