Eyes of a toad

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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.