Ulysses makes hundreds of references to things for the sake of referencing them, as if Joyce entered subjects from an encyclopedia at random. A quote at the bottom illustrates my point better. Bad pretentious is a sort of pseudo-intellectualism, which is more pretentiousness for the sake of being pretentious. I enjoy good pretentious, and by this I usually mean a handful of difficult references that complement or improve the narrative or theme. Even then, what on Earth is a book doing with this many annotations? I do enjoy relatively obscure references, but let's make a distinction between 'good' pretentious and 'bad' pretentious.

Provided you even use these, they do little to clarify whatever is currently happening in the text. In the Ulysses Annotations by Gifford and Seidman, Chapter One, roughly 20 pages in my version, has 197 footnotes. These are an incredible minority in the text.

Every author has written at least one remarkable sentence, if all-too-often by accident. It has some worthy quotes, but nearly no book is without them. I have read it and disliked it, but the motives for its positive reception are somewhat of a mystery, so I suppose I have to equally address the fans in order to understand the positive feelings towards it. There is a great deal of difficulty in trying to fairly gauge a work - there must be a distinction between Joyce, Ulysses, and the fans: it is natural for people to criticize a thing more if they do not like the followers or its position in the world. However, it should absolutely never have been referred to as the greatest book of all time, let alone a 'great' book. Perhaps, because of his style alone, it is worthy of the quantity of discussion that followed in the near-century since its publishing.

His Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is phenomenal, and I believe a much superior work to Ulysses (I'm illustrating a point, but let's not take the debate there). I refer to Ulysses itself as a work and not Joyce himself because I believe him to be a very capable author. I consistently work through many literature classics, and recently I finally made my way to Ulysses.

Ulysses novel