WHAT’S IN A NAME?

ULYSSES’S BLOOM ON THE SEASHORE

Abstract

Departing from the question asked by William Shakespeare’s character Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet, about what’s in a name, this work proposes a reading of James Joyce’s novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, discussing the possible meanings of the characters’ names. It was noted that there is a balance among name and identity in some moments of the novels, but that balance keep being lost.The conclusion was that the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  is an work in which there is a false impression, by the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, that there is a perennial balance among name and identity. Whereas, in Ulysses the imbalance is perceived in scenes with images of blooms and seashores as metonymies of the processes of identity lived by the protagonists Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.