BlackElectric said:
Apparently it's loosely based on the book 'Ulysseus' by a man named James Joyce. And so, I've taken this book out from my library and will decide for myself whether it seems to be "loosely based" around it.
Well, good luck. As Bodnex indicated,
Ulysses is widely considered the most difficult novel ever written in English. Don't get me wrong, I loved that book, but it is a bitch from hell to read.
Before you knock yourself out reading the whole thing (not that I'm discouraging it!) you might press your teacher for a more detailed explanation of how exactly he sees AB being "based on"
Ulysses, and what his source for that interpretation was. I can't help wondering if he simply read the brief Nighttown passage in
...End of the World and took something more from it than Flanagan intended. As I recall, Flanagan never suggested AB
intentionally alludes to
Ulysses, rather that he himself was reminded of Joyce's "Nighttown" by all that innocence-lost-wisdom-gained imagery in AB's lyrics. But this theme is hardly unique to Joyce, and anyhow
Ulysses is one of about 20 works Flanagan tries to tie Bono's lyrics into in the course of the book. I've never seen anyone but Flanagan link AB to
Ulysses, though.
Also...this is nitpicking...but
Ulysses is not a myth! It is (in part) a parody of Homer's
Odyssey, so I guess you could call it "mythic satire" or something like that, but that doesn't make the novel itself a myth. I understand what it means to call
The Matrix,
Star Wars, etc. myths--they fit the dictionary definition of being about archetypal characters--but Bloom and Daedalus are about as anti-archetypal as it gets.
BTW, there
have been a few scholarly papers comparing AB to Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Epipsychidion, which was what I initially assumed your teacher was referring to. I think these are bullshit too
, but, if you do have cause to write a U2 term paper for this class, Shelley would be considerably easier going than Joyce...
