This study addresses the most obvious, and possibly the most fundamental, question that most readers have asked about Ulysses: just what is the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and what does it mean? This is a two-part question, of course, and the answer to the question of meaning depends on what a reader decides about how the two protagonists are related to each other. The obvious difference in age, for example, has led interpreters to the father-son paradigm as determining the nature of the relationship, as well as suggesting the simple relation of youth to maturity as a guide to meaning. The action of the novel appears to insist on the importance of the meeting of the older and younger man, and even if we bow to a contemporary suspicion of the search for meaning and ask instead, "How does it work?," the nature of the relationship between the protagonists remains central.
The earliest identification, somewhat more unequivocal than later interpretations tended to be, was offered by Valéry Larbaud in a lecture at the 7 December 1921 "séance" sponsored by Sylvia Beach to promote Joyce's novel before its publication (JJ 519). Larbaud assured the soon-to-be-confused reader of Ulysses that the "key" to the relationship was the title and advised him or her that "Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, and Bloom is Ulysses." This tidy equation has served as an underpinning for the enduring father-son identification, enhanced by the casting of Bloom as Stephen's "spiritual father," a role suggested by Larbaud and endorsed by Stuart Gilbert, though vehemently rejected by Joyce's friend John Francis Byrne, who claimed that "St. Thomas takes his besom. and sweeps into the discard the notion of the human 'spiritual father.' "
Early in the 1970s, Edmund Epstein, interpreting Bloom's "fatherly" moves as a threat to Stephen's "becoming an independent creator," denied that Stephen was searching for a father and pointed to the evidence in the novel that the young artist, "no longer a son," was instead "striving to become a father." By 1980, Sheldon Brivic, though mentioning Bloom's "spiritual father[ing]" of Stephen and . . .