In addition, "Nausicaa" is cleverly related to other chapters in Ulysses in various other ways. For instance, Bloom notes that his watch has stopped at 4:30 p.m., the probable time of Molly's intercourse with Boylan. He pulls the sticky, semen-soiled material away from his foreskin, and his exclamation of "Ow!" reminds us of the unnamed narrator's painful, syphilitic urination in "The Cyclops." (This matter of Bloom having a foreskin has been the subject of recent scholarship; the Virag genealogy has been traced and, technically, Bloom is not a Jew. Thus, Bloom becomes, metaphorically, "neither fish nor fowl," paralleling his alienated social status in Dublin.) In this chapter, too, Bloom reveals that he was indeed aware of the newsboys' mimicry of his gait in "Aeolus," although once again he is able to escape into the world of imagination; here, he contemplates publishing a story in Titbits ("The Mystery Man on the Beach"), based on his own beach experience. He takes pride in his challenge to the Citizen in "The Cyclops": "Got my own back there." And his estimate of his sexual prowess is a somber one, which reminds the reader of Stephen's Parable of the Plums at the end of "Aeolus": "He [Boylan] gets the plums and I the plumstones."
Towards the close of "Nausicaa," Bloom draws the letters "I. . . . AM. A" on the sand, and the meaning is ambiguous. Several critics have advanced various possibilities as to Joyce's intent. Bloom could be the Christ who wrote an unknown message in the road to save the "woman taken in adultery." Or Bloom might be a kind of parallel to the Old Testament God: "I Am Who Am." He might also be indicating that he is not quite a full man at this point: "I am a man." Or as the Joyce scholar Fritz Senn has pointed out, Bloom's last thoughts might be of love, since ama is the Latin word for love. Certainly, Bloom's thoughts in the episode have been about Mrs. Purefoy, who has spent three days in labor, and whom he will visit in the next episode. At the end of the chapter, nonetheless, Bloom remains the charitable hero despite his pointless spilling of the seed that would continue his name and thus fulfill his duty as a Jew.
