Everything about Leopold Bloom totally explained
Leopold Bloom is the fictional
protagonist of
James Joyce's novel
Ulysses, assuming the role of the '
Odysseus' character. Like the Greek hero in
The Odyssey, he's absent at the beginning of the story, and doesn't feature until episode four of the novel (itself the opening episode of part two). Joyce introduces Bloom to the reader with the distinctive (and now semi-famous) words:
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. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Born in 1866, Bloom is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a
Hungarian from
Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from
Judaism to
Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and, later, committed
suicide) and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish
Protestant. He married
Marion (Molly) Tweedy on
8 October 1888. The couple have one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after eleven days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin.
Ulysses focuses primarily on Bloom and on the contemporary odyssey he embarks upon through
Dublin over the course of the single day of
June 16,
1904, and the various types of people and themes he encounters. (Although episodes 1 to 3, as well as 9 and to a lesser extent 7, concentrate more on
Stephen Dedalus, who in the plan of the book represents the
Telemachus to Bloom's Odysseus.) Joyce aficionados celebrate
June 16 as '
Bloomsday'.
As he goes about his day, Bloom's thoughts primarily portray him as somewhat preoccupied with the
affair between Molly and her manager (Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan); and, prompted by the funeral of friend Paddy Dignam, the death of his child, Rudy. His absence of a son may be what leads him to take a shine to Stephen, whom he goes out of his way to take care of 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. Also encountered are his sometime chauvinistic attitudes, his penchant for
voyeurism and his unfaithful epistolary
alter ego, 'Henry Flower'. Bloom detests violence, and his relative indifference to
Irish nationalism leads to dispute with some of his peers (most notably 'the Citizen' in the
Cyclops chapter).
Leo Bloom by Mel Brooks
Writer-director
Mel Brooks adopted the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical
The Producers. Leo is a nervous accountant, prone to
panic attacks and who keeps a
security blanket to calm himself. Nevertheless it's Leo who has the idea of how to make money from a failed play. In the 2005 adaptation of the Broadway musical,
Matthew Broderick introduces himself as Leopold Bloom.
In the
1968 film he was played by
Gene Wilder, and in the
Broadway musical and
2005 film by
Matthew Broderick. He has also been played on stage by
Steven Weber,
Lee Evans,
Roger Bart and
John Gordon Sinclair, amongst others.
Elsewhere in popular culture
Former
Pink Floyd bandmate
Roger Waters references Leopold Bloom in his song as sitting with
Molly Malone.
It has also been suggested by Jeffrey Meyer in "Orwell's Apocalypse:
Coming Up For Air, Modern Fiction Studies that
George Orwell's primary character George Bowling in "Coming Up For Air" was modeled on Leopold Bloom.
In
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart presents, a mock civics textbook, Leopold Bloom is mentioned in an example of a letter entitled "Writing your Congressman." The book suggests that if you've previously written to a Congressman, and you've not heard back, you should write one of the following combinations, "I live in your district and I
vote/plan on registering to vote this time/will wake up on Election Day with every intention to vote but, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom, will find my day inexorably pulling me in every direction but that one toward which I intended to go."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Leopold Bloom'.
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