Ulysses (novel) Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the "Odyssey", and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early 20th-century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to Britain. The novel is highly allusive and also imitates the styles of different periods of English literature.
Leopold Bloom and threatened because of his being perceived as a Jew. Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, described Bloom as "a nobody", who "has virtually no effect upon the life around him". In this Ellmann found nobility: "The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity - his assumption of a bond between himself and other created being." Joyce told Sylvia Beach that Holbrook Jackson resembled Bloom. Writer-director Mel Brooks used the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical "The Producers". Leo is a nervous accountant, prone to panic attacks, who keeps a security blanket to calm himself. Nevertheless, it