Ulysses is Leopold Bloom's book. While the narratological complexity of the novel has fostered much debate over its status as a work of realism, it remains unquestionable that the central focus of the narrative becomes Bloom. Joyce's experiments with novel form, which indeed often deny the reader the sustained illusion of fictive reality, came to fruition in Ulysses; by the composition of Finnegans Wake, the rudimentary structures of story-telling no longer held much interest for him. Karen Lawrence explains that in depending on “third-person narration, dialogue, and dramatization of scene,” the first six episodes of Ulysses lull the reader into false narrative expectations, which are of course later subverted to expose Joyce's boredom with the “staples of the novel.” But despite the eccentricities of episodes such as “Oxen of the Sun” or “Ithaca,” there exists throughout Ulysses the framework of a very traditional realist novel: consciously contrived plot, intricate characterization, representation of extrinsic social relationships, implied ethical meaning(s) – a constant and coherent cause and effect from character to action. Readers may continue to view Joyce as the hidden “hero” of the text, but Bloom is without a doubt the hero of the narrative's most fundamental interests.