Three sentence summary of the plot.
Run on sentences not allowed.
Go.
‘Three sentence summary of the plot.’
there is no plot. There never was a plot intended. I hope that answered the question.
It’s not plot driven but experience driven. It’s an Epic written on the head of a pin. The normal subject of the Epic was a years long struggle by nearly super-human heroes with a nation at stake (Homer, Virgil etc), it’s set on one day and involves completely ordinary, everyday people doing ordinary everyday things and finds the heroism in that. Just persisting. And within that moment to moment struggle, Joyce incorporates the vast accumulated cultural legacy of the West which is expressed in both high and low language.
“Three sentence summary of the plot.”
This eassayist described it well. It’s more than three sentences, though.
“The action begins in Dublin on the morning of June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus—the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, now a twenty-two-year-old university graduate living in Sandycove—has breakfast with his housemates and then goes to teach a class at the private boys’ school where he works. It’s payday, so he picks up his wages and then walks along Sandymount Strand, still wearing black to mark the death of his mother nearly a year before.
Next, we meet Leopold and Molly Bloom, a married couple in their thirties living on the north side of the city. Molly earns money as a concert soprano; Leopold is an advertising agent, the son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. When we first encounter them, Molly is planning to begin an affair with her tour manager Blazes Boylan when he visits her at her home that afternoon. Leopold is tacitly aware of her plans and, for whatever reason, makes sure to be out of the house in order to facilitate them. He goes out in the morning, buys a cake of soap, attends a funeral, eats lunch, does incredibly little work considering that it’s a weekday, and has dinner. All the while, he’s thinking of his wife, as well as their teenage daughter Milly and their late son Rudy, who died in infancy.
Meanwhile, Stephen Dedalus is also rambling around the city, adrift and increasingly drunk. He visits the offices of a newspaper and later stops in at the National Library to give a confusing and inebriated lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Even after Molly and her new lover Boylan have presumably parted, Leopold Bloom continues to wander. He’s insulted and attacked by an anti-Semite in Barney Kiernan’s pub, and he later masturbates on a beach while looking up a young woman’s skirt. At around 10 P.M., at a drinking session in—of all places—the National Maternity Hospital, Bloom and Stephen finally run into each other, and continue their wanderings together.
After a visit to a brothel, Stephen is assaulted in the street by a British soldier, and Bloom gets him back on his feet and takes him to a cabman’s shelter. The men then walk back to Bloom’s house, where they drink cocoa and talk. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, but Stephen declines. After he leaves, Bloom goes upstairs and gets into bed with Molly. They exchange some conversation, during which he tells her that Stephen is going to give her Italian lessons, and then Bloom falls asleep.
In bed beside him, Molly thinks back over her day and her life, reflecting on her new love affair with Boylan, anticipating a possible future love affair with Stephen, and remembering the days of her early youth and the beginning of her relationship with her husband. Countless other characters appear, and countless other occurrences are described, but this seems (at least to me) like a fair summary of the book’s main events”