Ulysses’ clear Homeric parallels begin to wane after the arrival of Chapter 12. In his abandonment of his own scheme, he purposefully shatters with it any preconceptions of authorial control of literature and its interpretation, and therefore necessitates his pivotal shift in Ulysses’ versatile and increasingly abstracted form. Joyce’s seemingly obsessive engagement with the phallus in Chapter 12 is not only farcical self-persecution of his authorship, but an earnest critical deconstruction of monolithic tendencies of a masculine obsession with dynastic fatherhood. The arrival of characters who sequentially suggest failure of dynasty, specifically the nameless narrator, Bloom, and J.J. O’ Molloy, all work to provide a glaring autobiographical ambiguity, and thus a distrustful masculine authority, from which he then intentionally divorces in order freely to embody his text and simultaneously empower the reader with interpretive independence.