Buck Mulligan

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Malachi "Buck" Mulligan is a fictional character in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. At once callous and complex, Mulligan is a Falstaffian student of medicine who has offended Stephen Dedalus by calling his mother "beastly dead." Yet later, Mulligan is portrayed as a hero for having saved a man from drowning. He appears primarily in episode 1 (Telemachus), and is the subject of the novel's first sentence:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Joyce based Mulligan on Oliver St. John Gogarty, with whom the author briefly shared the Martello tower in Sandycove.