James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was composed by transposing the mythemes "sub specie tempolis nostori," as the writer said in a letter.  The paperspace of the text, however, is open to the various levels of meanings.  In this essay, my porpose is to reconsider Ulysses as the collection of fragments without any teleological structure, and to seek for the possiblility of reading it as a satirical novel.

  To begin with, let's pay attention to the process of writing of book.  "Ulysses" in 1906 was a short story for Dubliners, a story of Mr Hunter who was rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife.  And Joyce clearly wrote in the famous letter that Dubliners was his "nicely polished lookingglass," reflected the negative aspects of "Dear Dirty Dublin."

  The lookingglass or the mirror is also a very important motif of Ulysses because there are many words which express it in the text.  Stephen said in the 1st episode, "It's a symbol of Irish art.  The cracked lookingglass of a servant."  In this essay, I see this as a self-reflective remark of Ulysses.

  Considering the modifiers of the "the mirror," there emerges a hypothesis that Ulysses has the natures of ridiculousness and spiritualistic medium.  This is the literary technic called "necrophilia," whose good examples are Mulligan's statement on death in the 1st episode, a religious ridicule in the 6th episode, social satires in the 10th, 12th, and 15th episodes.

  But Ulysses is a cracked lookingglass, not a broken glass, according to Stephen's remark.  Such fragmented descriptions should be woven in one or two strings.  Joyce, who had taken his education in the very Catholic atmosphere, used as the string the traditional ideas of "memento mori"(embodied by Stephen's ashplant) and "danse macabre" (by M'Intosh).

  The reason why Ulysses contains many necrophiliastic descriptions is that as a mirror it reflected the collective unconscious in the period 1914-21 when it was written.  Thus Molly's "Yes," the last word of Ulysses means not only the affirmation of "womb" but also "tomb," looking through the cracked lookingglass.