Leopold Bloom is a fictional character in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. He is a Jewish advertising agent introduced to us at the very beginning of episode 4 (Calypso) of the novel, with the following words:
- Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Ulysses is primarily focused on Bloom and the micro-odyssey he embarks upon throughout Dublin over the course of one day (though episodes 1 to 3 are more concerned with Stephen Dedalus[?]), the various types of people and themes he encounters.
Throughout the novel Bloom is aware of an affair his wife Marion is having with the go-getting singer Blazes Boylan, and broods about the death of his child, Rudy. He also demonstrates his chauvinistic attitudes, a penchant for voyeurism and his unfaithful pseudonym, Henry Flower, whom he promptly destroys almost as soon as we discover him.