 Stuart Gilbert said that the "personages of "Ulysses" are "not" fictitious", but that "these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some "lex eterna", an ineluctable condition of their very existence".Through these characters Joyce "achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life".Joyce uses "metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole" work.