The text proposed is called Penelope and is an extract from James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses. In particular, the work is divided into three parts, that is Telemachiad, Odyssey and Nostos, and in the last of them Molly Bloom's monologue takes place.

Well, in the text Joyce reports Molly Bloom's monologue taking place while she is waiting her husband Leopold in their bed. However, Molly suddenly starts thinking through free association of suggestions and Joyce renders it by using the most important narrative technique of the Modernist literature, that is the stream of consciousness, that allows the reader to come across Molly's deepest thoughts, feelings and secrets without any obstacle. The attention on characters' inner world rather than the one on external reality underlined the Modernist shift from the Victorian objectivism to the subjectivism, the same process occurred in art passing from Impressionism to Post - Impressionism and later Expressionism.

Molly's thoughts go from thinking about people in China  who are going to get up while she is supposed to sleep, to the imagine of the roses in the wallpaper in Lombard Street and finally to the memory of her date with Leopold in Howth. What's more, her thoughts are reported in the illogical disorder of her mind, and the effect is obtained thanks to particular writing choices, such as no punctuation, no organization into paragraphs and the predominance of coordination in syntax. It follows that the reader may feel without reference point reading the text with a superficial attitude, rightly stating that there is no story and no traditional linear plot. On the contrary, there are some reading guides, such as the repetition of the exclamation "yes"( ten times in the last lines of the extract) and the conjunction "and", which have the function to connect Molly's thoughts one to each other. Indeed the use of that words has also the aim to underline how human mind really works, in the sense of it usually goes from a thought to another without a logical link. In a way, our flow of thoughts takes over our attempt to think rationally. Interesting is to notice the high density of "yes". In particular, it highlights Molly's sensation of pleasure felt with Leopold

( "my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath") , recalling the sexual intercourse and the final "Yes" with capital letter further underlines the top of Molly's pleasure.

Taking into better consideration the last part of Molly's monologue, the reader comes across a cinematic scene, which is rendered through the use of the senses language. It follows that the reader becomes able to visualize Molly's memory in his mind. In particular, the language refers to Molly's smelt( "he could feel my breasts all perfume") and the one of flowers such as "the rosegardens and geraniums and cactuses" ; to sight( "colours", "mountains", "torrent"); to taste( "biscuits", "cakes"); to touch( "how he kissed me") and hearing, underlined by the high repetition of the verb "asked", that makes us understands that Leopold is asking Molly to marry him.

Going on, you notice that Molly has not been a faithful wife ( "he didn't know ... and the sailors"), like the Homer's Penelope, so the reader comes across Joyce's use of the Mythical Method, that is a new form of prose resulting from the progress made by psychology and anthropology. It allowed Joyce to make a parallel with the Odyssey to underline the crisis of values that occurred in Modernism and how human  nature really is. Not the one of hero and gods, but the one of ordinary people. Coming back to Molly's flow of thoughts, you notice that she is able to link together different places on our planet, unifying past, present and future in a time which the French philosopher Henry Bergson defined as "subjective time". This shows another parallelism with Homer's Odyssey: while in the epic poem there is  a sea voyage made by Ulysses to come back to Ithaca, in Joyce's masterpiece the voyage is not physical, but mental. Therefore in the text there is the use of specific words which aim to put into a better focus the theme of voyage. For example, you find words connected to the semantic field of geography( "Gibraltar, "Algeciras", "China", "Howth", "Andalusian", "Moorish", "Greeks", "Spanish") and to the one of natural world( "sea", "sky", the various kinds of flowers).