Among the authors who have accomplished the traditional novel's modification, we must remember James Joyce, above all, with his most famous book "Ulysses", which has formally the structure of "Odyssey". As a matter of fact, the work is divided into eighteen chapters, which refer to Homer's scheme: every chapter has a reference to the hour of the day (the whole action develops in a day), to the technique used, to a science or an art, to a part of the body. The three main characters: Stephen Dedalus (the young rebellious artist), Leopold Bloom (the old dubliner jewish, curious of experiences) and Molly Bloom (the unfaithful wife) correspond respectively to Telemacus, Ulysses and Penelope.
"Ulysses" talks about the events which happens to the protagonist Leopold Blumm in a day of his life. He is a person who has not the courage of coming back home because, there, a terrible wife is waiting for him: she is beautiful and sensual, but she is openly unfaithful to him and he has not with her a relationship in which his dignity is respected. It is the story of a man who constantly postpone the moment of the objective confrontation with his life, represented through the confrontation with his wife. This dismay, this refusal of Leopold coincides with loosing himself among Dublin's streets; during this wandering he meets Stephen, who is in search of a father figure, which he eventually finds in Leopold.
The novel has not a linear course, but it is a simply digression of the man in the city (in the world). The interesting aspect is the narrative method of this book: through the itinerary of Leopold and Stephen, the reader knows reality and the objects, described with a lot of precision. However we realize that the ordinary things have, as Joyce says, an endless expansion which he calls "rediens". Therefore the relation of Leopold with the world is never totally defined and the objects are considered for what they hide and not for what they are. The world at last, in this novel, ie an "epiphany", it is a manifestation of the hidden senses and of the secret meanings.
Therefore the novel does not express a conventional knowledge of the world, but it wants to communicate what the world conceals and what is hidden in the deepest and most secret aspects of human personality: its anguishes, its fears and its need of life.
The narrator is conscious of these things and he tells with a language which is no more conventional and narrative because the language helps no more to describe facts but the repercussions that the reality has on the author's conscience. The technique, which express this kind of statements, is called "interior monologue" or "stream of consciousness"; Joyce had already used this technique in "Dubliners", where he had adopted a pseudo-narrator at the third person who had the only task of signalizing actions and refering the thoughts of the protagonist but, with "Ulysses", we assist to the narrator's "destruction": only the protagonists' thoughts remain on the page.
The writing of the novel has the same cadence of the interior monologue, of the solitary reflection of man who is crossed by a flux of endless thoughts and sensations and who instinctively converts into language. This explains also the chaotic and apparently shapeless structure of "Ulysses", after that the conventional narrative structure is skipped: what interests is no more the relation of the fact and, therefore, in the middle there is no more a hero who represents the meaning or the synthesis of the narrated facts. In the middle of the novel there is, instead, the conscience which is something unknown for the protagonist himself, which only the language, with its endless flux, succeeds in discovering.