So says Professor Sallow: Bloom has been abundantly (and rightly) admired for his curiosity and his openness to the world, but these qualities are profoundly protectionistic: they direct Bloom "outside" when the going is tough "inside."

...Ulysses is an astoundingly strategic novel, the novel form loses a good deal of its prior innocence, nothing seems to be given or free or weightless or without context...the inner thoughts of a character are not random, but can be viewed as a form of naviagation...quite possibly we think about certain subjects to avoid others, I think about that cookie because I am avoiding this present moment, the behavior of this text is psychological to the core, but its psychology is everywhere, in the textual utterances, but also in the interstices, in the changing of venue or subject, in the actual dance of the mind rather than in single enunciations...

...irony and artistry are especially visible at such moments, we understand that the outside is never far from the inside...