If employment of deceit or ambiguity is a modus operandi in this episode, ironic contrast of "factual" events is another. Joyce uses his recurrent images and happenings to express a sardonic theme, and his motifs are very skillfully employed. Father Conmee's holy thoughts are juxtaposed against the sudden appearance of the flushed young lover and the young woman who cross his path (and who later turn up in "The Oxen of the Sun"). The arc of Corny Kelleher's "silent jet of hayjuice" is matched against the "plump bare generous arm" of Molly Bloom, as she throws a coin in an arc to the crippled sailor in the third episode of this chapter. Lenehan's comment that Bantam Lyons is giving out tips on the hopeless darkhorse Throwaway, false information which he originally received in the mixup with Bloom in "The Lotus-Eaters," is quickly followed by the appearance of Bloom himself looking for a sexy novel to bring home to his wife ("A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker's cart") and by a "skiff," the Elijah, "a crumpled throwaway," which floats (voyages) down the Liffey River throughout the episode. And the snippet from the patriotic, anti-British song "The Croppy Boy" ("At the siege of Ross did my father fall") is juxtaposed against Mr. Kernan's subservient rush to see the viceregal cavalcade.
Joyce's use of contrast is most effective in the fifth section of "The Wandering Rocks." Here, Boylan tells the girl from Thornton's to put a bottle of wine (meant to warm up Molly before his visit) in the bottom of the bag of fruit and to deliver it at once to "an invalid." Not content with the upcoming visit, however, he flirts with the clerk; he looks down into her blouse, and Joyce records for the reader the only unspoken thoughts of Boylan that we are told of in the whole of Ulysses: "A young pullet." Yet while the aggressive, sexually indefatigable Boylan contrasts with the sensitive, passive Bloom (who is getting his sexual pleasure vicariously in this section by glancing through pornography), it is Bloom, the "throwaway," who may at last triumph. Joyce makes it clear that Boylan is a mere stud: He reduces everything to sex, and to him women are less than human.
