The Homecoming
About the Section
"The Homecoming," the third and final section of Ulysses, includes three chapters, which use two settings, as listed on the side of the page. The three chapters of "The Homecoming" are
As a parallel to The Odyssey, "The Homecoming" is about Bloom's journey home and his reclaimation of that home.
The two locations featured in this section are the Loopline Bridge and Eccles Street, specifically 7 Eccles Street. The Cabman's Shelter, a pub underneath the Loopline Bridge, is the setting for Eumaeus, and 7 Eccles Street is the setting for both Penelope and Ithaca.
Most Common Allusions
The three most common allusions in this section were references to Gibraltar, Stephen Dedalus (in the sense that Stephen Dedalus, a character in Ulysses, is referenced from one of Joyce's other works, in which he is also a character, the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and Christianity.
Gibraltar was referenced 40 times, Stephen Dedalus was referenced 38 times, and Christianity was referenced 20 times.
There were 622 total allusions coded in "The Homecoming."
Map
The following map is a map of the locations of the "Homecoming" section. The locations are also listed to the left, even though the Loopline Bridge remains unfinished. Due to time constraints, we were unable to create separate web pages for every location during the semester we had to work on this project. However, you can see that Eccles Street is partially finished and can serve as an example of part of what we hope that the location pages will look like in the future.
You can see that the two locations from the section, Eccles Street and the Loopline Bridge, are featured on the map as purple dots.
The following heatmap displays the concentration of allusions, weighted by the most common allusions.
As the heatmap shows, the bulk of the allusions are present at the Eccles street location because it is a brighter color than the rest of the map. The other location, the Loopline Bridge, is only faintly lightened in comparison.
Network Graph
The following network graph relates allusions to locations pulled exclusively from "The Homecoming."
If you zoom in on the picture using the magnifier, you can see that each of the two locations sit at the center or near the center of a circle or semicircle. 7 Eccles Street, because it was featured in two of the three locations, has the full circle surrounding it because more allusions were made in that setting. Loopline Bridge sits in the middle of the semicircle, with a smattering of much smaller allusion circles surrounding it. The circles designating allusions are sized by closeness centrality, which means that the allusions "closest" to the locations are the largest. Closeness is determined by how strongly correlated the allusion is with the location. Moreover, the circles designating allusions are colored according to degree, which means that the allusions that are referenced the most often and in the most locations are lighter-colored than the allusions that are referenced fewer and in fewer places. As you can see, some of the most commonly referenced allusions, such as Christianity or Stephen Dedalus, are some of the lightest-colored circles.