What do you think of the characteristics of stream-of-consciousness novels in Ulysses?

The first time I read Ulysses, I started with a widely circulated sentence, 100 people can't finish reading Ulysses.

Ulysses is the work of Joyce, a famous Irish modernist novelist. Joyce studied modern linguistics at Dublin University and then went to continental Europe. Joyce's first collection of short stories was Dubliners, and then he wrote an autobiographical novella The Portrait of a Young Artist.

I think the literary evaluation of Ulysses is like two magnetic poles. Some comments have raised the value of Ulysses to a very high level, considering it as "a masterpiece"; Other comments belittle it as "vulgar and unsightly".

But I always look at Ulysses with admiration. It is a work that can show literary skills too much. Ulysses has a million words, but it only describes 18 hours. I can't imagine what kind of observation and imagination the author needs to write such a unique book. But there are not many characters in the book, only Bloom, Stephen and Molly are the three protagonists.

The success of Ulysses lies in the careful portrayal of the characters' hearts. Joyce, with her amazing literary skills, tells the story of three characters' activities in eighteen hours in one million words. Although Ulysses is huge, it has no superfluous words. Joyce describes the actions, language and subtle psychological changes of the protagonist with his understanding of life and delicate insight. The description of inner activities in Ulysses is exquisite, and every subtle ideological change of the three protagonists is clearly and truly presented to the readers. For example, in the third chapter of Ulysses, Joyce used a whole chapter to describe Joyce's psychological activities.

Bloom, the first hero of Ulysses, is a Hungarian Jew. He works as an advertising salesman for a newspaper in Dublin. The value of Bloom's image transcends his inherent identity. Joyce pays attention to Bloom, an Irish citizen in Qian Qian, with his profound social experience and solid literary foundation. Bloom's experience and temperament also belong to many Irish citizens.

Bloom's life has gone through many vicissitudes. His young son died young and his wife was unfaithful. He often deceived himself and struggled in love in name only. Bloom accomplished nothing in middle age, and faced with Molly whose salary was several times higher than himself, he felt inferior and insecure. But Bloom is so arrogant that he doesn't even want to go to restaurants with ugly customers. Bloom is warm-hearted, bloody, and helps drunken Stephen in a narrow sense. But on the other hand, he also has greed and petty desires, and even tries to bully a disabled girl on the beach.

Bloom was depressed and full of contradictions. He is confused about reality but full of hope, helpless but expecting miracles. Bloom lost his spiritual pillar and enterprising purpose, and his life and career suffered a heavy blow. Bloom's decadence reflects the loneliness, confusion and despair of Irish citizens in the early twentieth century.

Joyce condensed his 16 years' understanding of life and society into Ulysses. At the same time, it is a work whose value transcends social reality and rises to the depth of philosophy.

Odysseus is famous all over the world and is recognized as a great epic in human history. Joyce, on the other hand, wrote a contemporary ode with extraordinary understanding. Every chapter of Ulysses adopts a structure parallel to Odysseus. Joyce's originality and ingenious conception make the structure and meaning of Ulysses in harmony with Odysseus. Joyce applied modern life from the depth of epic and endowed Ulysses with philosophical connotation.

When a writer's literary skills reach a certain level, his works often penetrate into philosophy, such as A Dream of Red Mansions. The classic famous sayings in A Dream of Red Mansions are "Fake is true, true is false, and whatever it takes" and "Come and go naked, regardless" and "Falling into a vast expanse of white land, so clean". These are the author's philosophical reflections on life and the world.

Joyce and Cao Xueqin also raised their perceptual knowledge of society to rational thinking, which is why Ulysses and A Dream of Red Mansions are two novels rather than just novels.

Cao Xueqin wrote A Dream of Red Mansions as "every word is like blood, and ten years of hard work is extraordinary", while Joyce wrote Ulysses, which took sixteen years to conceive and observe and seven years to write a monograph. However, the more national culture, the more difficult it is to become the culture of the world. From this perspective, Ulysses and A Dream of Red Mansions have similar sadness.

A Dream of Red Mansions is undoubtedly a masterpiece at its peak. Cao Xueqin's integration of China's classical culture in A Dream of Red Mansions has reached the point where all rivers run into sea. Although A Dream of Red Mansions is only a novel, it contains almost all the essence of China's classical culture: poetry, Qufu, Yuefu, couplets, riddles, stereotyped writing, invitations, eulogy, letters, recipes, bills, prescriptions, divination and astrology. A Dream of Red Mansions is a world-recognized classical work of China.

But it is in line with the truth that the extremes meet, and such a great masterpiece, although recognized by the world, is not loved by the world. It is true that A Dream of Red Mansions ranks eighth in the world book list, surpassing a large number of European and American world masterpieces. However, like most national cultural classics, A Dream of Red Mansions has not become the universal culture of the world.

A Dream of Red Mansions has been translated into dozens of languages and distributed all over the world. There are also Red Dream Research Societies in Europe and America, but an American female reporter once bluntly said that her friends regard Dream of Red Mansions as a must-read book more than out of love. The survey report in western Europe also clearly shows that the popularity of A Dream of Red Mansions among the people is far less than that of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, List of Gods, and even worse than that of Jin Ping Mei. A Dream of Red Mansions is regarded as a masterpiece by foreign intellectuals.

Ulysses was published on1February 2, 922. It was the result of Joyce 16 and 7 years' writing, but it was banned in Britain and America for a long time after publication, and it was not circulated again until 1933.

Ulysses was not accepted by the world after its publication, and caused great controversy in the literary world after its listing. Virginia Woolf denounced the book as "vulgar and unsightly", and some writers even rudely returned Joyce's signed copy. Only a few writers with unique vision, such as Eliot, realized the value of Ulysses and tried their best to defend it. When Tsinghua University decided to list Ulysses as a required reading, it also caused many objections from the educational and literary circles.

Every time I think about this, I can't help feeling. Ulysses can be a world masterpiece or a masterpiece, but it is hard to be welcomed by readers all over the world.

Joyce and Cao Xueqin wrote two such works-Ulysses and A Dream of Red Mansions. Is this their greatness or their sorrow?

This work was voted as the first novel in the 20th century by readers all over the world from 65438 to 0998.