How Does Leopold Bloom Become Ulysses?

I look at Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to Nietzschean eternal recurrence. Ulysses, in my reading, remains deeply indebted to the Odyssey—but the Odyssey (for it now repeats) gets indebted to Ulysses too. Homer’s Ulysses outshines Bloom in many ways, but Bloom expands the heroic narrative in one crucial respect. I show that Bloom is the repetition of Ulysses. Many of Bloom’s doings are bathetic reductions of Ulysses’s wanderings. But, by forgiving Molly, Bloom strings the great bow of Ulysses, and indeed does so in a way that outdoes and rebukes his forebear.