Joyce's theme of wandering, of people destined never to join significantly but, instead, to move through webs of artifice, is epitomized in the character of W. B. Murphy — if, indeed, that is his true name. The red-bearded Murphy, who, with his typically Irish blather and blarney, resembles the clever narrator of "The Cyclops," is a drunken, belligerent misfit weaving his life around a tissue of lies. In many ways, Murphy typifies the worst traits of the archetypal Irishman, but, with his colorful personality, he has an abundance of compensating, attractive qualities. Here, Murphy has come from the three-master ship Rosevean, the ship that Stephen saw in "Proteus," and one wonders if the bricks which the vessel carries will lead to any future foundation (one is reminded of the stones, again, that are supposed to be in Parnell's coffin — instead of his body — and one is also reminded of the fact that Joyce modeled the amorphous hero of Finnegans Wake upon a drunken hod carrier). Murphy, another mock-heroic avatar of the returned Odysseus, is about to reintroduce himself to the wife that he has not seen in seven years. Bloom thinks of various returned heroes from fiction, and he cannot help projecting his own doubts onto his vision of the upcoming reunion: what if they don't want the returnee any more, and what is really Murphy's name, anyway? Is it possibly "Senor A. Boudin," as the postcard seems to imply?
Even more effectively than Murphy's own personal myths, however, Parnell's story better depicts Bloom's lonely desperation and his status as a wanderer with only a tenuous Ithaca to return to. Parnell, according to the pundits, was destroyed by a woman, Kitty O'Shea, his mistress. Like Molly, Kitty (the wife of Captain O'Shea) was a "fine lump of a woman . . ." and during the O'Shea divorce trial, Parnell became a laughing stock when it was revealed that he was seen scrambling down a ladder from Kitty's room in his nightclothes; in the next episode, the keyless Bloom will similarly have to scramble to get into his own home. What bothers Bloom about the retelling of the Parnell story in "Eumaeus" is "the blatant jokes of the cabmen . . . who passed it all off as a jest . . . ." To Bloom, who lives only in an imaginary sexual world (either with Martha Clifford or masturbating on the beach in "Nausicaa"), Parnell is a truly sexual, athletic hero, one who literally died for love. Bloom, quite naturally, probably envisions himself as the impotent Captain O'Shea, who, historically, agreed to ignore his wife's infidelity with Parnell (as Bloom is doing with Boylan) until O'Shea was convinced by a number of politicians that Parnell had to be disgraced and therefore lose office. And, after all, Parnell did thank Bloom once for picking up his hat, a marked contrast to Menton's treatment of Bloom in "Hades," when Bloom graciously pointed out a dint in the hat.
