The Möbius Narrative

Topological Continuity and Binary Dssolution in Joyce’s "Ulysses"

Abstract

This essay argues that the Möbius strip is not an ornamental conceit but the most exact topological figure for apprehending the formal and ideological procedures of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Drawing on spatial theory and topology, it reads the novel’s incessant perspectival shifts, recursive episode-designs, and abrupt tonal disjunctions as signatures of a non-orientable narrative surface that continually folds inner into outer, subject into object, history into form. Through close engagements with “Proteus,” “Circe,” and “Penelope,” with selective returns elsewhere, the argument isolates points of torsion where gender, embodiment, and national belonging do not stabilize but remain knotted as irreversible twists. The Möbius strip functions here as method rather than metaphor, forcing a re-reading of Joycean debates on difficulty, realism, and political commitment by showing that Ulysses renders modernity’s epistemic disorientation not merely as theme but as operative narrative geometry. Topology thus becomes a critical practice: a way of registering how narrative surfaces themselves think.