Buck Mulligan

He appears most prominently in episode 1 (Telemachus), and is the subject of the novel's famous first sentence: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

Buck Mulligan is described as having a "face... equine in its length",[3] a "sullen oval jowl",[4] a "strong wellknit trunk",[5] "light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak",[4] "even white teeth",[4] and "smokeblue mobile eyes.

He is widely regarded as a hero for having saved men from drowning, and appears to be well liked by all the characters in the book, with the exception of Simon Dedalus (who dismisses him as a "bastard" and a "contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian"),[7] and, to a lesser extent, Leopold Bloom.

Mulligan's finances appear to be at least partially dependent on the generosity of a wealthy, pious aunt; he is also mentioned as having a father who was a "counter-jumper"[7] (i.e. sales clerk), a mother, and a brother.

Buck Mulligan is the first character to appear in Ulysses, opening the novel by ascending to the top of the Martello Tower and performing a parody of the Mass with his shaving-bowl.

He then waits for Stephen to finish his discussion, interrupting with occasional and largely irrelevant commentary, and composes a playbill for a mock-Shakespearean play entitled Everyman His Own Wife Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand: A National Immorality in Three Orgasms.

He then attends an evening gathering at the home of George Moore, from which he is seen leaving during the rainstorm in "Oxen of the Sun", and joins Stephen, Leopold Bloom, and others in the cafeteria of Holles Hospital, where he expounds on an entrepreneurial scheme to offer his personal fertilisation services to willing women and gives an account of Haines's intoxicated behaviour at the soiree he has recently left.

At some stage during the medical students' ensuing drunken romp through Dublin, Mulligan meets Haines at Westland Row Station and takes the night train back to Sandycove, leaving Stephen in the lurch.

The character of Buck Mulligan is partly based on Oliver St. John Gogarty, a close companion with whom James Joyce fell out shortly before leaving Ireland.

He had originally inquired after renting the Tower with an eye to sharing it with Joyce, who was in need of a place to live while he worked on Stephen Hero, but the plan for cohabitation fell through after the pair quarrelled in August 1904.