This is an extract from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Right from the title, Penelope, we can understand the text deals with a woman.

In the first line, James Joyce give some information about setting:  the “unearthly hour” probably refers to early morning. The protagonist, Penelope, starts to think about what happens in the world at the same moment. After that the reader comes to know that she was woken up by the alarmclock of the next door, so she feels angry as the words “clattering the brains” suggest.

She is not able to get back to sleep. Her attention was captured by the flowers on wallpaper. Wallpaper was an expensive furniture, perhaps the woman belong to middle-class.

Flowers remember her two flower sellers where she could go to buy flowers for her home: she might be a housewife that love to take care her home. She wants to clean her home also because she has to meet a man, and then she think about what she could wear. We can suppose that the man is not her hausband, because if he were, she would not worry in that way.

Flowers, some line after, introduce a reflection on nature and how wonderful it is. Nature is made by God, “God of heaven” Joyce says, and criticize who does not believe in God: “why don’t they go and create something…atheist or whatever they call themselves”.

“That long kiss” suggests the woman already knew the man, she had kissed him. Besides she really loves him, because he is a special man.

After that she starts to remember some passed episodes.

In the last lines Penelope remembers some beautiful moments with the man. The last words “..yes I said yes I will yes” look like the wedding  form, so, probably, they get married.

In all the extract return the image of the “flower of the mountain” that express the happiest moment for Penelope, the climax of feelings.

There is no the narrator, James Joyce writes all Penelope’s thoughts with the stream of consciousness technique:  there are no punctuation marks, sentences are linked by parataxis.

The reader can understand that it is morning, but we do not have precise information, and we do not know anything about place.