Since I am one of the readers who believe in the structuring power of plot in fiction no matter how complex novel designs have become of late, this paper is a narratological exercise in tracing the plot of James Joyce's Ulysses in Hans Walter Gabler's digital, critical and standard 1986 edition of the text. The typically experimental meanders of modernist fiction can be more successfully engaged with digitally, when tracking the occurrences of individual words in their association with the narrative functions which frame a novel. Here, the career of the word parallax will be followed as part of the character Leopold Bloom’s path. The path being a character's order of experience and pointing to what exactly each character knows in the story, and in what order s/he grasps things, it acts as the frame for considering the advancement of the character's fictional life. As such, the path sheds light on a key component in the progression of a book's overall plot – this entity which gives significance and/or coherence to the details of the story. Being a third term added by Peter Rabinowitz to the story/plot dyad (Rabinowitz 2005: 182 et seq.), the path sheds light on the plotwise progress of story-details, especially when they are details rooted in a character's stream of consciousness (as is the case in several instances in Ulysses); in the path, details accumulate from within a character’s mind to configure increasingly complete meanings associated with one particular narrative whole.

The outcome of this research, which was made possible by connecting all the digitally available occurrences of, and references to, parallax in Joyce's text side by side with their explanations in Don Gifford and Robert Seidman's e-book, Ulysses Annotated. Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, will be a narrative that accounts for the promotion of the parallax from a leitmotif for the elder protagonist of Ulysses to the status of a plot-descriptor. Its counterpart is the postcreation, a Joycean coinage which circumscribes the path of the younger protagonist of Ulysses, the creator Stephen Dedalus. It is possible to formulate what the plot of Joyce's novel does by following the convergence of these two intratextual path markers.

As stimuli for a unifying reading of the Bloomsday chronological story on its way to becoming the Bloomsday plot both the postcreation and the parallax act as more than direct tributaries to the mainstream narrative.