In a development that will continue in later chapters, Hades
briefly blurs the line separating the consciousness of the
narrator from the consciousness of a character: "The
whitesmocked priest came after him, tidying his stole with one
hand, balancing with the other a little book against his
toad's belly. Who'll read the book? I, said the rook." The
first sentence is third-person narration, while the second and
third are Bloom's interior monologue, but they share the
verbal fancy of comparing the priest in the mortuary chapel to
an animal. The exchange continues in several subsequent
sentences, concluding with a supremely strange one: "Eyes of a
toad too."
Why or how does this happen? One answer comes immediately to
mind, though it does not prove entirely adequate to describing
what is going on: the first sentence is practicing free
indirect style, in which third-person narration
approaches the quality of a character's thoughts or words.
This style is employed liberally in the chapel, giving readers
a sense of Bloom's naive responses to the Christian rites even
when his thoughts are not directly represented. Six paragraphs
later, for instance, his ignorance of all the arcane
terminology of the Catholic church is comically conveyed
through deadpan narration: "The priest took a stick with a
knob at the end of it out of the boy's bucket and shook it
over the coffin."
It is plausible to suppose that the sentence in which the
priest balances a book against his belly is cut from the same
cloth, because subsequent sentences show that Bloom is
disposed to think of this man in animal terms. First he
recalls some lines from the Cock Robin nursery rhyme about a
bird who plays a parson: "Who'll read the book? I,
said the rook." And then, after the narrative cooperates
by saying that "the priest began to read out of his book with
a fluent croak," dogs and sheep enter the interior monologue:
"Bully about the muzzle he looks.... Burst sideways like
a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a
belly on him like a poisoned pup. Most amusing
expressions that man finds." It may be, then, that "toad's
belly" and "croak" are the narrative's way of
approximating the thoughts that Bloom is about to think.
But this way of reading the passage is frustrated two
paragraphs later when Bloom thinks, "Want to feed well,
sitting in there all the morning in the gloom kicking his
heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad too. What
swells him up that way?" By this point in the novel readers
may be prepared for hearing the narrative anticipate Bloom
thoughts, but they can hardly expect him to respond to
what it told them. The narrative says, The priest has the
belly of a toad. Bloom answers, Eyes too! It is
conceivable that he is responding not to the sentence of
narration but to one of his own thoughts, unrepresented in the
novel, that the narrative sentence points to, but Joyce is
extraordinarily careful about details like that. Instead of
having Bloom think of a toad's belly, he has the narrative do
so. The reader has little choice but to respond with
surprise.
The effect resembles a more blaringly obvious one in Andrew
Marvell's Upon Appleton House. The speaker of that
poem compares the mowers in a field to Moses' people crossing
the Red Sea: they "seem like Israelites to be, / Walking on
foot through a green Sea. / To them the Grassy Deeps divide, /
And crowd a Lane to either Side" (49). Two stanzas later, one
of the women bringing lunch to the mowers snatches up some
birds that their scythes have dispatched and exclaims, "he
call'd us Israelites; / But now, to make his saying true, /
Rails rain for Quails, for Manna Dew" (51). He called us
Israelites! Characters are not supposed to respond to
what the narrator says. In these two works, they do.
Two chapters later, Joyce has the narrator mockingly
repeat a pompous phrase of Stephen's, as if he is
sitting in the library office listening. Two chapters after
that, the narrative picks up on two women's mockery of an old
man and applies it to Bloom, as if
it has found inspiration in their dialogue. These are not
things that happen in ordinary novels.
