Yet, it is here, in "The Cyclops," that Joyce exhibits the true heroism of Bloom; for a few brief moments, the put-upon comic hero, having had enough, fights back by asserting his Jewishness. He begins to become irritated when the Citizen, in response to Bloom's insistence that Ireland is his nation, spits an oyster into a corner. Bloom becomes angry for the first time in Ulysses: "And I belong to a race too . . . that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant."
After Bloom leaves the drinkers for a moment to find Cunningham, the Citizen and his cronies, now thoroughly intoxicated, sponsor the silly belief that Bloom won a bet on Throwaway, but will not stand them to a round of drinks. They accuse him (wrongly, using Joyce's irony) of "defrauding widows and orphans." When Bloom returns to find that Martin Cunningham has been in Kiernan's while Bloom has been looking for him in the courthouse, the action proceeds to its conclusion. In answer to the anti-Semitic slurs of the dropsical Polyphemus-like character of the cyclops, Bloom (like Odysseus in Homer's epic) cannot help but retort: "Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me." And although the empty biscuit box thrown by the Citizen causes a mock heroic seismic disturbance, it has no more effect than Polyphemus's boulder. Bloom escapes down Little Green Street and is assumed, metaphorically and linguistically, into Heaven. The motif of the throwaway that announced Elijah's coming has now run its course.
