This chapter begins at about 10:00 a.m. Bloom has walked approximately a mile from 7 Eccles Street to get to the Westland Row Postal Annex, where he will pick up his letter from Martha Clifford. A careful study of a Dublin street map reveals that Bloom has actually gone out of his way to get to the post office and that, in this chapter, his meanderings form a complete circle. Bloom's circuitous wanderings point both to his guilt over the clandestine correspondence with Martha and to his unwillingness to secure a communication from her that might commit him to take a definite step in their so-far platonic relationship. The wandering also fits in with the dreamy, confused, drugged atmosphere of this chapter, which describes, as it were, various types of "lotus eating."
In Homer's epic, Odysseus and his men come to the land of the lotus-eaters, a hospitable tribe who have a fault: they are generous to excess, offering Odysseus's men a food that makes them forget their quest to return home; some of the crew, of course, eat the flowers and must be physically compelled by Odysseus to leave the country of their soporific hosts. Joyce, as a parallel, saw Ireland as a veritable land of lotus-eaters, its people dwelling in lethargic bondage to the Catholic Church and to their own unrecognized (or unadmitted) sexual yearnings, and he fills this episode with various types of drowsy, sleep-inducing means of escape from reality.
Thus we encounter the slightly dazed Bloom; before he picks up the letter from Martha, he stops before the windows of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and reads the "legends" (a pun on the Greek myths) of the tea containers, thinking languorously of the Ceylon blends. He tries to calculate how it is possible that a man can float in the Dead Sea, but his scientific mind deserts him as his reasoning trails off in a series of nonsequiturs. Also, when he turns to thoughts of his father's suicide, it occurs to him that he is an "escapist": he did not go into the room to look at his father's face, and he is glad that he did not do so. Later, Bloom goes to F.
