Bloom is introduced to the reader as a man of appetites: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the
inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick
giblet soup, nutty
gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried
hencods'
roes. But most of all, he liked grilled
mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. The Bloom character, born in 1866, is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a
Hungarian Jew from
Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from
Judaism to
Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and later died by suicide), and of Ellen Higgins, an
Irish Catholic. He is
uncircumcised. They lived in
Clanbrassil Street,
Portobello. Bloom converted to Catholicism to marry
Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple has one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after 11 days. The family lives at
7 Eccles Street in Dublin. Episodes (chapters) in
Ulysses relate a series of encounters and incidents in Bloom's contemporary odyssey through Dublin in the course of the single day of 16 June 1904 (although episodes 1 to 3, 9 and, to a lesser extent, 7, are primarily concerned with
Stephen Dedalus, who in the plan of the story is the counterpart of
Telemachus). Joyce
aficionados celebrate 16 June as "
Bloomsday". As the day unfolds, Bloom's thoughts turn to the affair between Molly and her manager, Hugh "Blazes" Boylan (obliquely, through, for instance, telltale
earworms), and, prompted by the funeral of his friend Paddy Dignam, the death of his child, Rudy. The absence of a son may be what leads him to take a shine to Stephen, for whom he goes out of his way in the book's latter episodes, rescuing him from a brothel, walking him back to his own house, and even offering him a place there to study and work. The reader becomes familiar with Bloom's tolerant, humanistic outlook, his penchant for
voyeurism and his (purely
epistolary) infidelity. Bloom detests violence, and his relative indifference to
Irish nationalism leads to disputes with some of his peers (most notably 'the Citizen' in the
Cyclops chapter). Although Bloom has never been a practising Jew, converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Molly, and has in fact received Christian
baptism on three occasions, he is of partial Jewish descent and is sometimes ridiculed and threatened because of his being perceived as a Jew.
Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, described Bloom as "a nobody", who "has virtually no effect upon the life around him". In this Ellmann found nobility: "The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity – his assumption of a bond between himself and other created beings."
Hugh Kenner took issue with the view of Bloom as "the little man", citing textual evidence to show that he is taller than average. He also has "relative wealth, an exalted dwelling-place, handsome features, a polysemous wit, a famously beautiful wife". Kenner admitted that the evidence came late in the text. He argued that Joyce gave the initial impression of Bloom's ordinariness because of the parallel with Ulysses, whose "normal strategy was to withhold his identity". Others such as Joseph Campbell see him more as an Everyman figure, a world (cosmopolis) traveler who, like Homer's Odysseus, "visited the dwellings of many people and considered their ways of thinking" (
Odyssey 1.3). One critic has argued that Joyce used the doctrines of the Incarnation cited early in
Ulysses to characterize his relation to both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and their relation to each other. The theme of "
reincarnation", also introduced early in the novel, has been linked to one of the doctrines to signify that Bloom is the mature Joyce in another form and that Joyce speaks through him. ==Popular culture==