Ulysses takes place on a single day — June 16, 1904. It follows one ordinary man through breakfast, a funeral, work, lunch, a pub, a beach, a hospital, a brothel, and finally home. Across roughly 700 pages, James Joyce attempts to fit the whole of human consciousness inside those hours.
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..."
The first line sounds almost mock-epic, and that is intentional. Joyce is setting up the joke the whole book will extend: that Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Dublin ad-canvasser, is the Odysseus of this modern age — and that the shaving bowl is the chalice. The comedy is in taking him seriously anyway.