'Who Is My Neighbour?': Leopold Bloom and the Parable of the Good Samaritan

The question of what it means to be a good neighbour runs through Joyce's Ulysses. Its two central characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are often rebuffed by their ostensible neighbours — Stephen by Buck Mulligan and Haines, Bloom by a whole series of Dubliners — and gradually drift toward each other. They meet at the end of 'Oxen of the Sun', interact throughout the apocalyptic 'Circe' episode, and then the parabolic episodes of 'Eumaeus' and 'Ithaca'. Bloom acts truly neighbourly to Stephen in these episodes, and his actions here and earlier in encounters with others in the novel are depicted as re-enactments of the Good Samaritan parable, perhaps Jesus's most famous story of this kind in Scripture. Reading Ulysses anew, I argue, enables not only a fresh apprehension of its parabolic arc over three of its last four episodes, but also allows us to become involved, caring readers of the sort Joyce desired. How does Ulysses draw us to it, generate affection for it and its characters, perhaps even lead us into caring for the Other? In part, it achieves this care by teaching us to read affectively and affectionately through its reinscription of such narratives as the Good Samaritan parable. We might then perceive it anew as a warm and welcoming fiction that invites us into its world of 1904 Dublin, allowing us to linger on the relationship between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and to understand how they re-enact that parable, so that we might become readers who are hospitable in turn to these characters.