My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Underlying this discussion is the fact that the novel opens by describing a conversation between two young men in a tower, one being Stephen, who has just lost his mother. The other, Buck Mulligan, says to him, “The aunt thinks you killed your mother,” to which Stephen replies, “Someone killed her.” The tower is the castle at Elsinore, Dublin Bay the strait between Denmark and Sweden, and Stephen is Hamlet. But Stephen is also Telemachus journeying in search of his father, Odysseus, which is to say Leopold Bloom, the Jew. And Leopold Bloom is, besides Odysseus, also Virgil when in the night he walks side by side with Stephen, which is to say Dante, through the streets of Dublin, which is to say Hell, and he is the writer Henry Flowers, who sends audacious letters on the sly to a woman whose acquaintance he has made by way of an advertisement. But he is moreover the father of a son who died, which in this universe makes him Shakespeare, father of Hamnet. And his wife is not only Penelope, who is besieged by men in Odysseus’s absence, but also Anne Hathaway, which is to say Queen Gertrude, since just after four o’clock that day she is in bed with her impresario, making a cuckold of Bloom.