Into my eye
Into my eye
In Brief
The first sentence of the chapter called Cyclops
comically identifies the unnamed narrator as a member of that
tribe of murderous giants by having him say that "a bloody
sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye." In
the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men disable the Cyclops
Polyphemus by waiting for him to fall asleep and then heating
a sharpened log in a fire and driving it into his single eye.
This Homeric analogue recurs several times within the cavelike
confines of Barney Kiernan's.
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Pressed to drink with the men in the pub, the abstemious
Bloom resists, "saying he wouldn't and he couldn't and
excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well
he'd just take a cigar." The narrator later refers
to this lit log in Bloom's hands as a "knockmedown
cigar," and when Bloom courageously asserts that
his Jewish people have been just as badly persecuted as the
Irish have, the image of a stick in the eye seems always to be
hovering nearby. The narrator paints a picture of "J. J. and
the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom sticking
in an odd word," and then he
quotes one of Bloom's interjections: "— Some people, says
Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they
can't see the beam in their own."
The Citizen, playing the part of Polyphemus in this exchange, does indeed fail to see the beam that has been thrust into his eye: "— Raimeis, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?" Bloom's thrust was too subtle for a shaggy monster to feel.
