This paper is to investigate how the modernist novels such as Madame Bovary, Heart of Darkness, The Ambassadors, The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Ulysses are different from the 18th and 19th century novels in terms of narrative technique. It also illuminates how Ulysses is distinguished from other modernist novels in the issue of the representation of reality by investigating an encyclopedic showroom of narrative techniques of Ulysses. My studies start from the recognition that every novel chooses its special rhetorical strategy in respect to the social and historical context. In the 18th and 19th century novels, the narrator is a total or partial mouthpiece of the author. This reflects the spirit of the times, in which each member of the society can enjoy the all-agreed value and moral conviction. Most modernist novels except Ulysses pursue ``an absent author`` in that there is no more one absolutely hegemonic or authoritative way to represent reality. This kind of novel reflects skepticism, relativity, and uncertainty of the modernist world. Ulysses is unique, however, in the sense that it is written with various revolutionary, innovative, and experimental narrative techniques on a line between pure telling and pure showing. In this respect, Ulysses is not just a novel of ``absent author`` but a dynamic novel. Considering that no one angle or narrative style would suffice to grasp the protean elusiveness of human nature in its completeness, Joyce emphasizes that in the modernist world, every point of view and every style is insufficient, inappropriate, arbitrary, and relative. The more diverse techniques Joyce tries, therefore, the more vividly he reveals difficulty of capturing the changing reality itself, uncertainty, and even post-modernist indeterminacy. Ultimately, in Ulysses, more than in any other modernist novels, Joyce demands from the reader to be more active ``writerly-reader.``