In Episode 8 of Ulysses, Joyce sends Bloom and the reader through a food challenge that expands on one of the novel's major linguistic strategies, that of gradual digestion. While episode 10 might seem like a more appropriate choice for a spatial representation of the city, this episode maps digestion as if Bloom were wandering the streets of Dublin, with thoughts primarily entering through the body and exiting. In T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", the stanzas downgrade the city from the horizon to the bottom of the sea in accordance with the fictional hero's inability to fully digest any complete thought to the bottom. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayBloom describes the process of eating with a realism suited to the task: "And we stuff the food into a hole and out the back: food, pound, blood, dung, good dirt: you have to feed it like you feed a machine" (144 -5). In fact, this is the path that the words take in the novel; they begin in a pure form, as if written on a page (like Martha's "Aren't you happy in your house, poor disobedient boy?" which, despite its impure implications, is at least black ink on white paper) and seeps into each stage of Bloom's journey (as in episode 8, 137 The gradual digestion of words fits another of Martha's lines, the). typographical error "I called you bad darling because I don't like that other world" (131). These words become "worlds", carving out a space for themselves as they travel through Dublin with Bloom throws the "disposable" into the Liffey, and his words float not just down the river, but along with Bloom, causing him trouble and marking him as disposable himself. The words often allude to their own creation or foreshadow another episode: "Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is becoming. Pen" (128) Referring both to the "pen" that Joyce wields and to Molly as Penelope, the words they are empty until they are endowed with Sense. Consider “plump,” which begins the novel ambiguously. “The stately and plump Buck Mulligan came from the top of the stairs” can be read with “plump” as an adjective for round or as “sudden or sudden fall or sinking” (OED, 10.2), and eventually comes to represent another of his 10 meanings prescribed by the Oxford English Dictionary, "cluster, bundle, clump" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1). This type of digestion of words finds its spatial form in the blind boy whom Bloom helps to cross the street. The young man is initially profiled by his relationship with food: "Spots on his fur. He drools the food, I suppose. It tastes all different to him. They have to be stuffed first. Like a child's hand, his hand. How was that of Milly. Sensitive. Evaluating myself, I dare say from my hand" (148). The young man's sensitivity to food, his loss of dexterity compensated for by his other senses, makes him more aware than Bloom in other ways: "The sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells from all sides, clustered together. Every street has a smell different" (149). The young person digests places differently; he must carefully approach each one as if it were new, he must protect a piece of meat dangling precariously from his fork. His sense of space is visually circumscribed but takes on a different and imaginative form: "Maybe he sees things on his forehead: a kind of sense of volume. Weight or size, something blacker than darkness. I wonder if he would feel it if something pit must have a strange idea of ​​Dublin, drumming among the stones" (148-9). Joyce boasted that Dublin could be rebuilt from.