Many of the earliest readers of Ulysses found themselves stymied by Joyce's experiments with form. For example, in a largely positive review, Holbrook Jackson groused that ‘the greatest affront of all is the arrangement of the book, Ulysses is a chaos’. In order to counter such claims, Valéry Larbaud took some effort to emphasise the book's overall structure in his introductory talk at Adrienne Monnier's Maison des Amis des Livres in December 1921 (subsequently published in the first issue of The Criterion). Larbaud stressed that the book was not a chaos and had a structure, and that this structure, registered on the schema Joyce had used while composing it, informed the meanings of the book at the smallest level.

The structuring scheme for Ulysses thus explains its welter of images and symbols and so forth and, in so doing, enriches the experience of the text.