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        One of the greatest master pieces of world literature Ulysses by James Joyce was published in 1922. It is a continuation of the story of Stephen Dedalus told in a Portrait of an Artist By a Young Man (1916). The latter is an autobiographical novel which follows the emotional and intellectual growth from childhood to young manhood of Stephen Dedalus, who is also the protagonist of the later, more complex Ulysses . The development of artistic self-awareness necessitates young Stephen's rejection of the values of his upbringing, including blind patriotism and rigid Catholicism. The narration is in the 'stream-of-consciousness style' which Joyce was instrumental in developing.

        Harry Levin in his famous book on James Joyce rightly observed: 'The narrative of Portrait of an Artist By a Young Man has scarcely emerged from the lyrical stage. The personality of the artist, prolonging and brooding upon itself, has not yet passed into the narration. The shift from the personal to the epic will come with Ulysses, and the centre of emotional gravity will be equidistant from the artist himself and others. And with Finnegans Wake the artist will have retired within or behind, above or beyond his handiwork'.

        Ulysses published in 1922 continues the story of Stephen Dedalus as a mature man facing the trials and tribulations of life. This major psychological novel is structured around 'Homeric' parallels, so that the incidents, characters and scenes of a single ordinary day on 16 June, 1904 in Dublin correspond to those of the Odyssean myth. It's a panoramic extension of Joyce's nostalgia. Like the epic of Homer, from which it takes its name, it's a full-scale parallel of exile and wandering, of blundering search, distracting interludes, tortuous encounters and ultimate resignation. The beauty of this original and trend-setting novel lies in the fact that all the Homeric events occur in a matter of 24 hrs in Dublin as experienced by Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus), Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) and his wife Molly (an unfaithful Penelope). The narrative centres upon Bloom, who has lost a child, and is looking for a substitute son, and Dedalus, who has repudiated his family and his religion, and, disconnected with mankind, is seeking a father. Ulysses can be viewed in the form of a quest and the quester is almost everybody. William York Tindall, the great Joyce critic, was of the view that James Joyce in an unique and original way interpreted the modern world for all of us. To quote his appropriate words: 'whether it have as its object tradition or what some call integration, the life-force or five-year plan, the latest yogi from Los Angles or Almighty God, the search is the same and so its real object'. Joyce symbolised the hunt of Stephen Dedalus for his father. With his own loss in real life and need in mind, he made a suggestive image, perhaps the most adequate of all, for the central occupation of modern man'.

        A very interesting fact about James Joyce's novel Ulysses is that very much before it was published in 1922, it was subjected to the heavy hand of censor in USA in 1918. There were mutterings when it began publication as a serial in 1918 in 'The Little Review'. 'The American Society for the Suppression of Vice' got busy and the US Post-Office confiscated all copies on the charge of obscenity. The editors were fined and finger-printed, and the serialisation was stopped. The book became a Collectors' Item. It was sold under the counter. Joyce shared with D H Lawrence's similar ill fortune in respect of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Suffering in poverty, Joyce did not receive a penny. For a long time the vindicators were in the minority, while the air was filled with invectives. Joseph Collins in the review in 'The New York Times' conceded that the Ulysses was the most important contribution to 20th Century fiction. At the same time he also observed that Joyce 'is the only individual that the writer has encountered outside of a madhouse who has let flow from his pen random thoughts just as they are produced'.

        Joyce had taken seven years to complete Ulysses ; when it was legally safe for Americans to read it he was 52 years old. He was going blind, before he died there were ten operations performed without anaesthetics—and he was forced to write his manuscripts on thousands of pages of paper covered with huge letters. Illness, low finances, and family troubles continued to plague him. In 1940 when the German Armies came in swarms into France during the Second World War, Joyces were forced to move to Zurich in Switzerland.

        In Zurich, struggling against poverty, isolation and rapidly failing eyesight, Joyce finished his controversial Finnegans Wake , a monumental language experiment. In Ulysses the conflicting rushes of thought were channelled in smoothly flowing monologues, occasionally relieved by the plain speech of the dialogues and the sharp lines of the narration. In Finnegans Wake there is no such clear cut division, nothing but a continuous, gathering, turbulent stream of ideas, an onrushing torrent of broken images and idols, a mutiny of disjointed quotations and unrelated things, contradictory thoughts and symbols in 'the rivering waters of hither and thithering waters of night'. Night controls Finnegans Wake as day governs Ulysses . In order to liberate his narrative from the restrictions of time, Joyce composed Finnegans Wake as an accumulative dream. He endowed it with a dream's timelessness, its private language and its irrational logic. We can recognise in this book Joyce's mastery of language, his double and triple meanings illuminated by a contrapuntal prose.

        In 1941, Joyce's hardships increased. Finnegans Wake was a financial failure. Harassed by fears for the future and worried about what might happen to his young daughter, he broke down. He developed a malignant duodenal ulcer, was operated upon, failed to recover, and died in Zurich on 13 January, 1941.

        Joyce was both a poet and a pedant. At the same time it is indisputable that as an originator he was both outrageous and inspiring. He enlarged the Shakespearean soliloquy into an interior monologue of unexampled length, breadth and richness. He was the first to employ the 'stream of consciousness' as a running commentary, a tossing flood of free associations. Speaking of Joyce's preoccupation with verbal structure, one of his critics said: 'In the beginning was the word and the word was life; in the end there was only the word'.