Inside the hotel, Bloom's position is further isolated. He sits in the dining room and is thus cut off from the camaraderie (albeit superficial) and the singing at the bar. In order to hide himself further from Boylan, he chooses to eat dinner with another outcast, Richie Goulding, whom Stephen had contemplated visiting in "Proteus." "Uncle Richie" has been ruined by drink. Like Bloom, he too is subservient, and even though his brother-in-law, Simon, no longer speaks to him, Goulding admires Mr. Dedalus's voice. Goulding is so inconsequential (so thoroughly an "outcast" and a nobody) that Bloom is able to write his perfunctory letter to Martha while sitting with him, symbolically covering his uninspired jottings with the Freeman, yet trying to convince Richie that he is answering an ad. In the meantime, the snapped rubberband that Bloom has been playing with has its parallel with Bloom's broken relationship with Molly, and the blotted letter to Martha prefigures the end of that relationship. (Also, Bloom, who never sees matters in terms of either/or — that is, he never sees things in terms of black and white — doesn't sign the letter, and he disguises his writing by using Greek e's.) Toward the conclusion of this chapter, Joyce explicitly defines Bloom's isolation: "Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last sardine of summer. Bloom alone." One is reminded here that the fish is a frequent literary symbol of Christ.
Whatever sentimentality there might be in Joyce's portrait of Bloom, presented in "The Sirens," it is countered by the comic corrective of the protagonist's breaking wind at the end of the episode; this occurs as he reads the last, noble words of the martyred Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, found on Emmet's picture in the window of the shop of the antique dealer Lionel Marks: "When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done." ("Lionel," the name of the antique dealer, is an echo again of the opera Martha.) Bloom's (and Joyce's) "Pprrpffrrppff. Done" implies a respect for life over death, for the reality of emotions deeply felt over empty political rhetoric, whether it be found in "The Croppy Boy" or in Emmet's "windy" words before his death.
