The style of "Ithaca," with its question-and-answer format and its "scientized" language, has caused critics some difficulty. Joyce, while admitting that the format of "Ithaca" is indeed difficult, called the chapter his own personal favorite. And the style does fulfill several functions. Its catechetical nature supplies a religious basis for the discussion between Bloom and Stephen. And, if the chapter can be said to have a true narrator, he is a vast Olympian figure who can place seemingly important but really ephemeral mortals and their actions into the perspective of a large cosmic consciousness. In fact, "Ithaca" is Joyce's preparation (his preliminary groundwork) for Finnegans Wake, with its shadowy, hulking archetypal personages. Finally, the "objectivity" of the episode permits Bloom to use the screen of logic as a kind of filter in order to bear the almost unendurable pain which he feels from Molly's assignation. He perceived Boylan's presence almost from the start of the chapter — as early as the incident of the betting tickets that Boylan tore up in anger after Sceptre lost the race. What is perhaps most regrettable about the assignation itself is that Molly and Blazes make no real attempt to disguise the adultery. Bloom, however, imagines the act; he, in a sense, uses fancy and imagination to disguise the painful blatancy of the adultery; now he is confronted with its direct evidence — that is, with the facts of its physical reality: for example, there are the chairs, rearranged so that the two lovers could sit beside each other to sing "Love's Old Sweet Song"; there are also the cigarette butts, as well as a male's impression in the Blooms' bed, and also there are the traces of Plumtree's Potted Meat (Boylan, metaphorically, "potted" Molly with his "meat").
The concept of marital infidelity bothered Joyce himself greatly throughout his relationship with his wife, Nora. Joyce's play, Exiles, hinges upon Richard Rowan's fear that Bertha has been unfaithful, and here, in Ulysses, in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter, Shakespeare is seen to have suffered throughout his life from the thought of a loved one who had betrayed him. "Ithaca" must have been extremely difficult for Joyce to write; for this reason, it is reasonable to conclude that he handled his wound of doubt by putting an aesthetic distance between Bloom-Joyce and the corrupted Molly. Significantly, in "Penelope," Joyce has Molly think of Bloom at the very end of her soliloquy and respond with a resounding "Yes."
