Bloom and "A Girl"

Joyce's sentences stop as soon as the reader is about to learn something important. He cuts himself off before he fully concludes a thought. The prose of the text (if you can call it that) is another thing that made reading comprehension difficult. It felt like a constant stream of consciousness with no editing, almost frantic and frenzied, like senses being bombarded. At some points, it was like watching a movie, except with a constantly-moving camera.  Although his sentences are abrupt, his ideas are not; they linger from one of Bloom's  church-going experiences to the next, giving the feel of one huge religious moment with smaller, less distinguishable events within.  Bloom was very critical of priests in all his religion endeavors. From John Conmee's sermon , to communion, to the "secret invitation" funeral service, Bloom always critiqued something the church's authority figure did. After communion, Bloom notes, "The priest was rinsing out the chalice...Wine. Makes it more aristocratic..." Father Coffey is described and compared to sick animals and aggressive symbols ( bloated with belly of "poisoned pup", "burst sideways like a sheep in clover",  "eyes of a toad", "looks full of bad gas") Later Joyce says, in a slightly authoritative voice, "Mr Bloom glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand up at the gospel of course." like Bloom was following some code, rather than being a sincere Christian that internalized and embodied the virtue of respect.

Joyce's style prepares us for McBride's writing by conditioning us to ignore the grammatical aspects of the text and focus more on the imagery and ideas. The prose, in both "Ulysses" and "A Girl," feels more like poetry than a narrative of characters and events. The narrator that is introduced to us is a little girl that weirdly recounts her own birth and from then on begins explaining her life's events in a child's way of thinking. We are forced to see the world through a child's eyes, and because our childhood is so far behind us, we lack that imagination and that is where the difficulty lies. We must picture a world where we abandon what we know and try to start from the beginning like the girl does. Once again, there's a feeling of cinemation when reading these texts, like the sentences are the camera directing us to focus on certain emotions or events and then quickly diverting to the next (similar to the way kids take in everything, and everthing looks big to them). It's challenging to follow, but once we've read for a little while we start to see in the same way she sees.