Bloom, then, is portrayed in "Calypso" as accepting and accommodating, the nurturer of life who coordinates the meals and provides sustenance while Molly sleeps. However, this picture of the thirty-eight-year-old Bloom of 1904 is not the only one presented in the novel, and a careful reading of Ulysses reveals the tremendous changes that have overtaken the protagonist in recent years. At one time, Bloom was very outspoken — a socialist, a Parnellite, and an ultimate Irish nationalist; he was so outspoken, in fact, that his politics and his personality cost him his employment. And there is a suggestion at the end of Ulysses that "Poldy" will regain some of his "spunk"; in fact, Joyce implies in the last chapter, in "Penelope," that Molly will go along with Bloom's demand that she bring him breakfast in bed.
But in "Calypso," it is the uxorious, or submissive, side of Bloom that emerges. Bloom, for instance, takes pains to prepare Molly's breakfast exactly as she likes it: she insists on four pieces of toast, which must be thin, and the plate must not be full. He acquiesces to her order that he must hurry with the tea. He crawls around, picking up her dirty underwear, to find the risquŽ book, Ruby: the Pride of the Ring, which he finally locates against the orange chamber pot (another instance of creativity being associated with defecation). And he promises to get her another book by Paul de Kock; eventually, he rents Sweets of Sin, but neither this book nor Ruby is by de Kock: "Nice name he has."
Bloom's streak of fatalism, we realize, may cause a problem for his daughter; he sees in the fifteen-year-old girl the same budding sexuality that Molly possessed at the same age. She fell in love, for the first time, with Lieutenant Harry Mulvey in Gibraltar. Bloom thinks that Milly may lose her virginity to Bannon (she does not); nor did Molly to Mulvey, but he says simply: "Prevent. Useless." On the other hand, Bloom's accommodating, kindly, and permissive nature is revealed in his thoughts of poor Paddy Dignam that end the chapter.
