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The previous image and this one reveal more of the dynamic between Molly and Leopold, one hinted at in Adeline Glasheen’s points earlier, and highlighted in our commentary thus far about Bloom’s role in his own home: he gets bossed around. “Hurry up with that tea.” “Scald the teapot.” He is tiny Bloom again in the middle two panels, a diminished image to go along with the diminutive “Poldy,” until we get to the close-up in the penultimate panel: then we see him “on the boil sure enough.” The slow movement down the stairs is captured by the arrangement of the panels in a large white space; I think it makes Bloom seem disconnected from his own home, sort of disembodied and floating and alienated, the way we saw him earlier outside the bedroom door on page 8.
It also seems that the dominance of the white highlights the empty space where Bloom’s thoughts should be: we have the narrator, the exchange about the teapot, and Bloom’s slightly cryptic, slightly aggravated thought balloon hovering near hunched shoulders, but not a whole lot else to indicate what he might be going through.