Once you are convinced that pleas for divine aid are
merely soliloquies that serve to clarify your own motives and perhaps to summon up your resolution to act, prayer as a genuine dialogue, a pleading before God, evaporates.
Surely, Nora's influence on Molly Bloom's
soliloquy in the closing chapter of Ulysses proves her to have been a fascinating muse rather than
merely an ignorant, dutiful wife.