 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 <unk> , the poem has been a victim of <unk> readings in which the reader expects to reconstruct the truth from a misleading narrator 's accidental revelations . ( <unk> the more obvious use of this approach in Robert <unk> 's " My Last Duchess " . ) <unk> himself views " Ulysses " as a dialectic in which the speaker weighs the virtues of a contemplative and an active approach to life ; Ulysses moves through four emotional stages that are self @-@ <unk> , not ironic : beginning with his rejection of the barren life to which he has returned in Ithaca , he then fondly recalls his heroic past , recognizes the validity of Telemachus ' method of governing , and with these thoughts plans another journey . 
