A common epitaph, “As you are now so once were we,” reminds the visitor that life is the temporary state, and death the final. Its inclusion in Hades is fascinating because Joyce has shifted the perspective from Bloom’s to the collective voice of the dead. Here, the cemetery – the “many” – speak. This brief ventriloquism disrupts the novel’s usual flow, dissolving Bloom’s individuality. For a moment, the interiority of Ulysses expands outward, encompassing not just Bloom’s private thinking but the countless lives before him. It is a haunting reminder of human transience, resonant and subtle. The novel, so rapt in the granularities of one day in Dublin, quietly gestures toward something larger.