Declan Kiberd has argued that Joyce believed Ulysses would “invent a new sort of reader, someone who after that experience might choose to live in a different way. He wanted to free people from all kinds of constriction, among them the curse of passive readership.” By perceiving Bloom’s encounter with Stephen through the intertext of the Good Samaritan parable, with its emphasis on the need for the hearer to respond, we ourselves are expected to respond in some way; in so doing, in connecting with Stephen and Bloom, we help continue the parable’s action into the present. Joyce thus expects and depends upon our read-erly labors. Arguing that “disconnectedness” is the “anxiety that Ulysses massively struggles to transcend,” Leo Bersani posits that “Joyce’s dependence on his readers is most pronounced, for it is their intra- and extratextual work that reconstitutes his mind as the serene repository of the resources of our language and culture.” Much of Joyce’s success in conveying his message of hospitality and loving our neighbor depends upon our response, which is unquantifiable finally, but still worth examining. If Ulysses exemplifies a particular kind of wisdom literature, as Kiberd argues throughout Ulysses and Us, then by so doing, it also seeks to inculcate a new ethical responsibility—and even agency— in readers because of what we have learned about treating those different from ourselves in its pages. In this regard, Virginia Moseley was the first critic to argue for Joyce employing his retelling of the Good Samaritan parable to reach the reader, even to rescue the reader. She reads “Eumaeus” through Jesus’ walk to Emmaus, concluding that Joyce himself “‘bucks up’ his reader ‘generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly’ needs.