Throughout this episode, Joyce infuses a sense of exhaustion, emptiness, and futile wandering. The syntax contributes immensely to this effect, as Joyce fills the chapter with lengthy, unfinished sentences, creating an atmosphere of vast attenuation, artifice, and especially a feeling of tiredness. And in the midst of all this, the dissipated Corley presents a warning of what Stephen might become: "His friends had all deserted him." The Simon Dedalus that Murphy describes is almost certainly not Stephen's father, but rather a sharpshooter who traveled with Hengler's Magic Circus. The fact that knives were used in the Phoenix Park Murders points, according to the logic of the small-minded cabmen, to the fact that foreigners must have been hired to do the killing: a knife, by custom, is not an Irish weapon. The tattoo that adorns Murphy itself is chimerical: if one pulls the skin, the young man's face changes. Significantly, the tattoo includes the number of this episode — 16; and, to some critics, this number signifies homosexuality, though this surmise, of course, is only that, a surmise; yet it is interesting that the number "16" is associated in Europe with homosexuality, just as "69" is associated in the United States with homosexuality.
Returning to the idea of dissipation and tiredness, the patrons of Fitzharris's establishment are willing to argue so long as no blows are exchanged, a trite and tired (and Irish) standard. They resemble the peasants in Synge's Playboy of the Western World; these people admire Christy Mahon's blather about killing his father until the father reappears in person; then Christy, apparently, truly must kill the man. Again, the facts about Skin-the-Goat are wrong; he did not drive the car used by the murderers; he drove only the decoy car. And the newspaper report of Dignam's funeral is thoroughly phony in both its praise of the deceased and also in its factual information.
Finally, in "Eumaeus," poor Bloom reveals only too clearly his desperate need to be accepted — as well as to accept — that is, he needs to be comforted, as well as to comfort. The usually equanimous Bloom is still brooding over the insult by the Citizen in "The Cyclops" and, to make his point, pitiably he denies his Jewishness on a technicality: "though in reality I'm not." Later, he again (sycophantically) turns the conversation around to Molly, showing an outdated photo to an indifferent Stephen. And his plans for "shanghai-ing" Stephen into a singing career are countered by the three turds dropped by a horse at the close of the episode.
The Dublin that Joyce presents in "Eumaeus" is a particularly distressing one, resembling Conrad's description of London in The Secret Agent: an aquarium after the water has been drained.
