So far Leopold Bloom seems to be a really interesting amalgam of the id and the ego. In Waiting for Godot you have obvious character distinctions, so Estragon gets hungry or complains about his feet (things based very much in the physical) while Vladimir's actions and character are based very much in the realm of the intellectual. Each one serves as paradigm a psychological construct. And while it is of course normal for an individual to have traits from both the id and the ego, Leopold Bloom is unique because he seems to be a written as a paradigm of both. He obsesses over food (kidney, sausages, bread and butter, etc.), dotes on a the body female neighbor of his whom he runs into and in the end fully enjoys his bowel movements. Yet he is proved to be an intellectual to some extent with regards to the metapsychosis and a few other moments of intellect in the drivers seat. I'm not sure what question I have that arises from this observation but it will be interesting to see how this plays out through the rest of the novel.
Afterthought:
Am I misreading the amalgam/ does Dedalus stand as the intellectual foil to the physical Leopold? or does Leopold's duality ring true anyway?
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Bloom and Stephen are opposites in a way, but not in the stark Beckettian way. Bloom represents - and we see this more in Lestrygonians - something of a middle path. But Bloom lives very much in the body and loves the body and all its processes - sex, excretion, childbirth, eating. Stephen: the world of ideas yearning for reification in the physical world. I guess google/blogger doesn't know the word "reification."
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