In addition, Power's discussion of suicide reveals yet another side of his religious alienation from Bloom: the humaneness of the unbeliever Leopold Bloom as opposed to the cold orthodoxy of Power's brand of Catholicism. Power thinks that suicide is the worst imaginable crime and the greatest disgrace which a family can suffer. For his part, Dedalus believes the act to be cowardly. But the sympathetic Cunningham attempts to soften these strident viewpoints and argues with compassion: even if the suicide did not suffer from temporary insanity, which rules out Mortal Sin (which needs full consent of the will), he says that it is not for us — the living — to judge. Through all of this debate, Bloom, locked in his own world, considers one of the most moving ideas in Ulysses: "They used to drive a stake of wood through his [the suicide's] heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."
At times, however, Bloom's divergence from accepted religion, his prosaic, "humanist" contemplation of life and death, leads to a good deal of humor and helps to balance the macabre thoughts of death that Joyce indulges in throughout this episode. To Bloom, the heart is merely a pump, and his matter-of-fact opinion anticipates contemporary medicine. Bloom also cannot accept the Resurrection of the Body, one of the chief tenets of Christianity: "every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps." And Bloom's comment that when the dead Lazarus was ordered by Christ to come forth from the tomb at Bethany, he "came fifth and lost the job," is famous among 20th-century puns.
In order to contrast the bland but usually good-natured Bloom with the often aloof Stephen, Joyce includes several parallels between "Hades" and "Proteus." Both chapters deal with the beginnings of life and with its end: The old lady on the first page of "Hades" who stares at the carriage, happy that it has passed her by, that it isn't her turn to die yet, reminds one of Florence MacCabe and her friend, mentioned on the first page of "Proteus." At the graveside, the coiled coffinband is referred to as a "navelcord," and one thinks of Stephen's wish to make a telephone call back to Eden, using a telephone wire as a metaphor for all the umbilical cords since the pre-lapsarian Garden. Also, the father-son theme is seen again in Simon's misunderstanding of Stephen: Mr. Dedalus assumes that his son has been at the Gouldings, whereas the reader knows, from "Proteus," that Stephen has decided not to visit these in-law "outlaws"; Richie Goulding, whom Mr. Dedalus despises, is the chief of these, and in "Hades" we are told that his back pains are caused by alcohol. Finally, Bloom's judgment that Molly has retained her original, sensual "shape," even though she has put on weight, reminds us of Stephen's musings about appearance, reality, and the shape of objects in the opening paragraphs of "Proteus."
