The chapter “Penelope” of the novel “Ulysses” by James Joyce belongs to the last section of it. It consists of a monologue of one or the most important characters who is Molly, the protagonist’s wife. It is written using the narrative technique of the stream of consciousness but with particular innovation.

First of all the stream of consciousness has to be defined: it is based on free mental association, that move in space and time with no logical sense but linked by the personal coherence of the character.

One of the most important and evident innovations is the total absence of punctuation and structure. The speech is a linear and an uninterrupted series of images, thoughts that are not organized in sentences or paragraphs so there isn’t the traditional construction of the discourse. So the text is quite difficult to reader also because the concepts told don’t follow a logical-causal organization but they have a meaning only for Molly who has lived, will live or is living something and she links that events together associating them as they come to her mind. That’s why in the text there is not a defined space or time. The scene opens in the bedroom of Molly where she’s trying to sleep but she can not and she reflects on time (shift from the present), thinking that in China the people is getting up, that the nouns will soon sing the angelus, ecc. Then she comes back to her present, immediately after she thinks about the next day when she will prepare the house for Stephen’s arrive: this is the time of consciousness, where past, present and future live simultaneously. Finally she looses herself in her memories which concern her husband and her when he proposes to her.

All the text is empty of senses references and allusion: the reader, to better understand it, has to be totally involved and participate. In fact Joyce adopts the language of sense impression: he refers to smell, touch, sight, hearing and taste to better evoke the atmosphere and express the stream of consciousness of the character.

The most frequent connector between sentences or images is and: it follows that the images that come to her mind follow one another.

In addition there are two leitmotif that link the beginning of the monologue and its end: the firs one is given by flowers and it culminate at the end when she thinks about Gibraltar. The other one is the word “yes”: his continuous repetition gives rhythm to the final part of the text and it culminates in the final yes which seems to sum up Molly’s sensuality.