Buck Mulligan - Role in Ulysses

Role in Ulysses

Buck Mulligan is the first character to appear in Ulysses, opening the novel by ascending to the top of the Martello Tower and performing a parody of the Mass with his shaving-bowl. He then calls Stephen Dedalus up to the roof to keep him company while he shaves. During their discussion, it is revealed that Mulligan has recently been to Oxford and has brought back an English friend, Haines, to stay at the Tower. Stephen, who has been wakened in the night by Haines's violent nightmares, threatens to leave the Tower if Haines remains there. Mulligan claims to dislike Haines, but seems reluctant to evict him, as he apparently hopes to wheedle some money out of him before his visit is over. The conversation later turns to the subject of Stephen Dedalus's late mother, and Stephen, after some prodding from his companion, reveals that he has been nursing a year-long grievance against Mulligan, whom he overheard referring to Mrs. Dedalus as "beastly dead" shortly after her death. Mulligan is at first confused, then irritated and embarrassed by this accusation, but quickly recovers his joie de vivre. During breakfast he tries and fails to get Stephen to assist him in borrowing money from Haines, and subsequently arranges to meet Stephen at a pub called The Ship at half past twelve, where he intends to buy them all drinks with Stephen's teaching paycheck. He then asks Stephen to give him the key to the Tower and goes for his morning swim in the Forty Foot.

Mulligan surfaces again in the chapter "Scylla and Charybdis" at the National Library, where Stephen is expounding his theories on Shakespeare. He playfully berates Stephen for failing to meet him at the pub and expresses his suspicion that Leopold Bloom, whom he has seen ogling the buttocks of the classical statues in the adjoining National Museum, is a sodomite with homosexual designs on Stephen. He then waits for Stephen to finish his discussion, interrupting with occasional and largely irrelevant commentary, and composes a playbill for a mock-Shakespearean play entitled Everyman His Own Wife Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand: A National Immorality in Three Orgasms. At the end of the chapter he steers Stephen out of the library for a drink.

Mulligan puts in a brief appearance in "Wandering Rocks", where he meets Haines at a bakery and vocalizes the opinion that Stephen Dedalus is insane. He then attends an evening gathering at the home of George Moore, from which he is seen leaving during the rainstorm in "Oxen of the Sun", and joins Stephen, Leopold Bloom, and others in the cafeteria of Holles Hospital, where he expounds on an entrepreneurial scheme to offer his personal fertilization services to willing women and gives an account of Haines's intoxicated behavior at the soiree he has recently left. At some stage during the medical students' ensuing drunken romp through Dublin, Mulligan meets Haines at Westland Row Station and takes the night train back to Sandycove, leaving Stephen in the lurch.