This essay explores Joseph Conrad’s Marlow and James Joyce’s Bloom as representations of their respective authors, examining their potential to create a new national consciousness that  unites the individual,  reflecting ideology, and the community,  symbolizing reality, within  a colonial framework.  Both characters embody colonial hybridity, navigating the tension between colonial ideology and the lived reality of the colonized. Marlow, shaped by Conrad’s experience as a British-Polish outsider, struggles to fully acknowledge the truth of colonial reality. While he recognizes the falseness of white men’s ideals, he remains ambivalent,  unwilling to face  the harsh realities of  colonialism, much like Conrad’s reluctance to reconcile his noble Polish heritage with the suffering reality of Polish peasants. Marlow’s hybridity reveals the complexity of colonial reality but leaves the potential for nation-making unresolved. By contrast, Bloom, as a Jewish outsider in British-ruled, Catholic Ireland, is more attuned to  the  truth  of  colonial  oppression.  His  doubly marginalized status allows  him  to  perceive  the  contradictions  within  Irish  nationalism  and Catholicism, as well as the betrayal within the colonized community. Bloom’s empathy and ability to envision a free and loving society distinguish him from Marlow.  He  reframes  the  bleak  colonial  reality  into  a  vision  of  spiritual freedom,  reflecting  Joyce’s  aspiration  for  a  “loveliness”  yet  to  be  born  in Ireland.   Bloom’s   hybrid   experience   offers   a   more   promising   path   to nation-building than Marlow’s hesitant engagement with colonial truths.