Penelope is the name of an extract from Ulysses, a novel by James Joyce. In particular, it belongs to the third part of the novel, called nostos (return). Nostos, Ulysses and Penelope should remind the intelligent reader of Homer’s Odyssey But what makes the extract and also the novel very particular is that there is no Ulysses, no Penelope and no voyage; indeed James Joyce wrote an experimental novel in which he had studied the epic poem in order to turn it upside down and create something new.

When first reading Penelope, the reader feels confused since he is in front of a stream of consciousness. From the syntactical point of view, it means that there is no punctuation, nor organization into paragraphs. The reader is just guided by the repetition of the exclamation “yes” or the coordinative conjunction “and” at the beginning of each association Molly made, but he is asked to make sense alone.

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.

To conclude the narrator is totally eclipsed, according to Modernists’ need to put character’s inner thoughts at the centre of the investigation, there is no plot, no story, past, present and future are blended in a time called psyche time and the whole narration seems to focus its attention to the image of flowers (the word flowers is repeated lots of times within the extract), which allow to create the atmosphere of Gibraltar.