Novel: Finnegans Wake

Overview
James Joyce’s 1939 novel unfolds as a nightlong dream of a Dublin publican and, by extension, of human history itself. Its language fuses English with dozens of tongues into punning portmanteaux, making narrative, myth, and memory flow together like the River Liffey. The book begins mid-sentence and ends mid-sentence, forming a loop that mimics cycles of falling and rising, sleeping and waking, dying and renewal. Rooted in Irish ballad and European philosophy yet restless with comic exuberance, it portrays a family’s private ordeals as masks for universal patterns.

Characters and Plot
At the dream’s center is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE, a publican whose initials shift and echo “Here Comes Everybody.” He stands both as a particular Dublin figure and as a composite of fathers, rulers, and fallen giants. His rumored transgression in Phoenix Park, blurred, suggestive, and endlessly retold, triggers waves of gossip, accusation, and self-defense. Reports mutate with every retelling, implicating him in scandal yet never settling the facts. He is harried by crowds, lampooned in songs, arraigned by sages, and buried in stories.

His wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, is the riverine counterforce. She speaks in flowing cadences linked to the Liffey, bears and shelters the family narrative, and drafts a letter intended to redeem HCE. Their children refract parental tensions: Shem the Penman is the disreputable artist, forging and defacing, while Shaun the Post carries messages, judges, and delivers official pronouncements. Their sister Issy shimmers in mirrors and doubles, representing volatile desire and the splitting of identity.

Around them circle gossips and authorities: the washerwomen who debate ALP across the riverbanks; the Four Old Men who quiz and adjudicate; balladeers who turn rumor into folk memory. Fables burst within the dream, the Mookse and the Gripes, the Ondt and the Gracehoper, miniature parables about pride, labor, and art that refract the family drama.

Structure and Language
The novel’s four parts move from nightfall toward dawn. Part I lays out the fall and the rumor, introducing HCE’s ambiguous offense and ALP’s countervailing river voice. Part II pulls into the children’s domain, schoolroom lessons, games in the pub, and mirror-play that fracture identity. Part III lifts Shaun to prominence as courier and moralizer; he ferries ALP’s letter while staging his own sermon and trial of Shem. Part IV breaks open into daybreak, when ALP’s monologue runs seaward in a farewell that doubles as a benediction.

Joyce’s language dissolves conventional borders. Words carry multiple meanings at once, compressing historical epochs, newspaper slang, liturgy, and nursery rhyme. Ten unpronounceable thunderwords mark shock, catastrophe, and the recurring crash of history. Vico’s philosophy undergirds the pattern of cycles, divine, heroic, human, then ricorso, so that the dream’s form echoes a philosophy of recurring worlds.

Themes and Motifs
The core movement is fall and resurrection, modeled on the comic ballad “Finnegan’s Wake,” where a laborer’s death is undone by whiskey and laughter. HCE’s guilt may be sexual, political, or existential; its very uncertainty becomes the novel’s engine, since language itself generates and distorts truth. ALP’s river voice suggests continuity and forgiveness against HCE’s embattled solidity. Writing and carrying, Shem and Shaun, oppose the creativity that blots and invents against the authority that delivers and judges.

History is heard as a pub chorus: rumor as communal memory, song as verdict. National and global myths are superimposed, as if every figure is a palimpsest of predecessors. The book treats identity as masks worn by a stream of voices, with comedy as both revel and release.

Ending and Return
At dawn, ALP’s voice thins as the river reaches the sea. She calls to her sleeping husband, to the city, and to the returning day, ready to dissolve and begin again. The last broken sentence rejoins the opening, “riverrun…,” closing the circle. The dream ends by recommencing, a book that wakes to fall asleep and falls to rise.