The ironic interpretations of " Ulysses " may be the result of the modern tendency to consider the narrator of a dramatic monologue as necessarily " unreliable " . According to critic Dwight Culler , the poem have been a victim of revisionist readings in which the reader expect to reconstruct the truth from a misleading narrator 's accidental revelations . ( Compare the more obvious use of this approach in Robert Browning 's " My Last Duchess " . ) Culler himself view " Ulysses " as a dialectic in which the speaker weigh the virtues of a contemplative and an active approach to life ; Ulysses moves through four emotional stages that are self @-@ revelatory , not ironic : beginning with his rejection of the barren life to which he have returned in Ithaca , he then fondly recall his heroic past , recognize the validity of Telemachus ' method of governing , and with these thoughts plan another journey .