In episode 8 of Ulysses, Joyce sends Bloom and the reader through a food gauntlet that expands one of the main linguistic strategies of the novel, that of progressive digestion. Although episode 10 might seem a more appropriate choice for a spatial depiction of the city, this episode maps digestion as if Bloom were wandering the streets of Dublin, with thoughts primarily entering and exiting the body. In TS Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the stanzas defuse the city from the horizon to the bottom of the sea, consistent with the false hero's own inability to fully digest any complete thought. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayBloom describes the process of consumption with task-appropriate realism: “And we shove food into a hole and behind it: food, chyle, blood, manure, earth are good: they must be fed as you feed an engine” (144-5). This is indeed the path taken by the words in the novel; they begin in pure form, as written on a page (like Martha's "Aren't you happy in your house, poor little naughty thing?" which, despite its impure implications, is at least ink black on white paper) and are filtered into each stage of Bloom's journey (as in episode 8, 137). The gradual digestion of the words corresponds to another of Martha's sentences, the typographical error "I called you mean darling because I don't like this other world" (131). These words become “worlds,” carving out a space as they travel through Dublin with Bloom. Bloom throws the "throwaway" into the Liffey, and his words travel not only down the river, but alongside Bloom, getting him into trouble and marking him as a throwaway himself. The words often allude to their own creation or foreshadow another episode: "Pen something." Pendennis? meaning. Consider “plump,” which begins the novel ambiguously. "Buck Mulligan, plump and stately, came from the stairhead" can be read with "plump" as an adjective for round or as a "sudden or abrupt fall or sag" (OED, 10.2), and comes to represent another of its 10. prescribed meanings by the OED, “cluster, bouquet, tuft” (OED, 1). This type of word digestion finds its spatial form in the blind teenager whom Bloom helps cross the street. The young boy is first delimited by his relationship to food: "Spots on his coat. He drools his food, I suppose. It tastes different to him. You have to feed him with a spoon first. Like the hand of a child, his hand. Like Milly's Sensitive. Measuring, I dare say, my hand" (148). The youngster's sensitivity to food, his loss of dexterity compensated for by his other senses, makes him more aware of Bloom in other ways: "The sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells from all sides, grouped together. Every street smells different” (149). The young person digests places differently; he must cautiously approach each one as if it were a new piece, a piece of meat dangling precariously from his fork that he must protect. His sense of space is visually circumscribed but takes a different and imaginative form: “Seeing things on their front perhaps: a sort of sensation of volume. Its weight or its size, something blacker than darkness. I wonder if he would feel it if something was removed. Feel a strange idea of ​​Dublin which he must have, as he makes his way by the stones" (148-9). Joyce boasted that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses' map and, indeed, we there are.