在詹姆斯‧喬伊斯的小說《尤利西斯》中，第六章〈陰間〉係以主角布盧姆參加老友葬禮的經驗為主軸，因此布盧姆的思緒經常環繞在與死亡甚至屍體有關的主題上。用克莉斯提娃(Julia Kristeva)的理論來解釋，屍體這個極致的棄斥物(abject)會讓生死相接、界線不清，因此生者必須以埋葬等儀式來淨化它，來處理屍體或死亡所帶來的威脅。就這個層面來說，布盧姆在此章中對屍體的諸多冥想，可說是展現了抗衡死亡威脅的面向；不過另一方面我們不能忽略布盧姆也曾害怕死者復活的可能性，因此曾說一旦確定死者沒有生命跡象就該趕快把棺材關起來，可見死亡，或更具體的說應該是屍體，為生者帶來的恐懼是如何地不易驅散；有鑒於此，本論文對〈陰間〉此章的解讀，除了著重分析布盧姆如何從關於屍體的冥想中得到智慧之外，也將說明布盧姆對死亡儀式的觀察如何揭露了葬儀的運作機制與功能：例如「入土為安」的種種儀式為何與其說是讓死者安，不如說更是為了讓生者安。本論文第一部分援引克莉斯提娃的棄斥理論，闡述布盧姆對屍體所作的貼近觀察與思考如何使他較能抗衡死亡的陰影；第二部分以布盧姆對死亡儀式的觀察，說明葬儀如何牽涉到生者棄斥死亡的意圖以及如何幫助生者完成哀悼的過程。第三部份則藉助佛洛依德(Sigmund Freud)與德希達(Jacques Derrida)關於哀悼與憂鬱的理論，進一步以布 盧姆對死去的父親及兒子的記憶與憑弔為例，闡釋主體面對至愛之死亡時所可能採取的悼亡方式。

In "Hades," the sixth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, the protagonist Leopold Bloom constantly dwells upon the subject of corpses and comments on the ritual of death. Bloom's efforts to make sense of death make him lauded by many critics as a hero capable of enduring the horror of death. Actually, as I will point out in this paper, Bloom is not unaffected by the threat of corpses altogether; at times he shudders at the thought that the dead might come alive and suggests it is better to “get shut of” the corpses. Bloom's eagerness to see the dead being buried, however, should not lead us to the conclusion that he is after all overwhelmed by the threat of death. In fact, Bioom does outweigh many other Joycean characters in confronting the threat posed by death. What Bloom's appeal for burial reveals is the uncanniness of the corpse which cannot be easily sloughed off by human beings; further, it lays bare the function of burial as purification of the corpse, or, to put it in Julia Kristeva's term, of the abject. This paper seeks to, on the one hand, explore how Bloom's pensive meditation upon the corpse exempts him from the endless but futile abjection of death: recognizing that "[i]n the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet," Bloom paradoxically survives the threat of death. On the other hand, this paper would like to explicate how Bloom's observation of the ritual of death lays bare the mechanism of the funeral and enables us to grasp the nature of mourning as self-dislocating: mourning succeeds when it fails, for it is when we end our grief and no longer mourn for the lost object that our mourning can be considered as successful. In the last part of this paper, I will account for Bloom's mourning for his father Rudolph and his son Rudy. Applying Sigmund Freud's, Kristeva's and Jacques Derrida's theory to analyzing Bloom's recollection of Rudolph and Rudy, I want to point out that what safeguards the subject from melancholia is precisely the ability to mourn, or, to name the loss.