"Ithaca" takes place at Bloom's house at 7 Eccles St. at about 2:00 a.m. on June 17. Bloom and Stephen discuss a huge variety of topics; Bloom makes Stephen cocoa (Joyce implies that this is a "communion"), and, after Stephen leaves, Bloom assesses his day's activities and gingerly crawls into bed beside Molly in an upside-down position, kissing her rump. The sleepy Molly asks him what he has been doing all day (and night), and Bloom supplies a partial litany of the events, leaving out anything incriminating.
The contrast of Bloom's actions with those of Odysseus is crucial. Odysseus and Telemachus united at the end of the Odyssey in order to kill the suitors who had insisted on courting Penelope until she chose among them. Bloom, the passive 20thcentury anti-hero treats Molly's infidelity with the "suitor" Boylan with acceptance and generosity. Although he reserves the right to divorce Molly at a later date and although he considers using witnesses to catch her in some future act, these thoughts of his are only a small part of the emotional complexity with which he approaches his sad situation. Here, Bloom experiences envy, jealousy, abnegation, and equanimity, but Joyce makes it clear that Bloom's feelings consist mainly of "more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity." Bloom, as a modern humanist, sees Molly's affair as part of the natural pattern of the universe: what happened was due to woman's instincts and the impulsiveness of Boylan's youth. Besides, although Boylan thinks that he is unique, he is "the last term of a preceding series. . . ."This "series," however, is not to be taken literally; instead, Joyce means for us to understand it as part of a vast cosmic theme — that is, the list of lovers which Bloom supplies for us is a product of his fancy, an attempt by him to assuage the pain of his present feeling of separateness from Molly.
