The extract Penelope is taken from Ulysses by James Joyce and it belongs to the third part of the structure called Nostos. It is also the last part of Molly Bloom's interior monologue.
The first thing that leaps out to the reader's eyes is the layout. At a first looking the most relevant fracture from the traditional and conventional way of writing is the absence of paragraphs and punctuation.
As the reader starts reading he immediately finds himself into a river of thoughts, Molly's thoughts. She is laying in her bed and she can't fall asleep. She wonders what people are doing in China, she thinks of what she will do later then she counts trying to fall asleep again. Apparently the narration seems to make no sense but the intelligent reader will soon realize that the narrative technique that has been chosen is the stream of consciousness in which thoughts and feelings run as a river, not caring about time or logic. In the stream of consciousness the mind works by association and analogies, jumping from the present to the past to the future and then again to the present and so on.
This is exactly what happens in Molly's mind. Her thoughts, while she is trying to fall asleep so she is half conscious, shift from the present ( considerations about time; people getting up in China; nuns singing the Angelus; the alarm clock of the neighbours; trying to fall asleep; the flowers of the wall paper;...) to the future ( Purpose to adorn the house for Steven’s visit; what she should wear) and then to the present again ( Considerations about the price; appreciation of ; landscape and nature; criticism of atheist) and then to the past , to a specific episode in the past: to a past youth in Gibraltar (memory of her husband declaration of love; considerations about her husband; reflection on other people)
However, even though thoughts and ideas seems to be left on their own, they are strictly connected by the repetition of the same words or the same sound such as "yes", used before each sentence after Molly declares that she got him ( her husband ) to purpose to her, or the connector "and" between her thoughts. Also the use the word "yes", which is constantly repeated at the beginning and at the end of some sentences, reveals that Molly's thoughts flow in a circle.
Moreover the landscape, Gibraltar, is recreated by the association of the different races existing there: Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Europeans,... It also recalls to the "Colonne d'Ercole" which nobody had crossed until Ulysses, pushed by his Hubris. It follows that James Joyce, through the paradigm of Ulysses, conveys the need of knowledge that is inborn in all human beings.
Last but not least in the last few lines Molly reveals all her sensuality. The language she uses is the language of sense impression smell, touch (long kiss put my arms feel my breasts), sight (sea and sky, glorious sunsets, trees, yellow houses,..)hearing (Spanish girls laughing,) taste (a bit of seed cake) that do not describe the scene but evoke it.
Molly's interior monologue is the most complete experiment in the novel of the stream of consciousness method. It represents the natural dis-order in which modernists feel lost; it explores the deepest part of human beings, what they really are, how their minds really work. It proves that it doesn't exist only a chronological time but there is also an interior time, the time of consciousness ( as Bergson will call it) in which past, present and future meld all together. In all this Molly represents the symbol of perfection (her thoughts flow in a circle and the circle is the symbol of perfection). She is the mother, but at the same time she is the lover. She reveals the multifaceted nature of the human being and this is what Joyce really discovers.
But what really is innovative and unique in Joyce (despite the use of the mythological method, the antihero, the use of language of sense impression, the concept of time, the plurality of identities,...) is the relationship he establishes between the reader and the text. As a matter of fact, in Penelope, the reader is functional to the interpretation of the text depending on his knowledge. It means that there are different levels of interpretation and everything it's up to the reader. He has to participate and trying to enter in Molly's mind through his own experience in order to understand the text. This is possible because Molly is not just a character of James Joyce's Ulysses but she incarnates an existential condition.