Finnegans Wake Summary: Joyce's Dream Book Explained
What it is about
Finnegans Wake is James Joyce's last novel, published on 4 May 1939. Parts of it had appeared in instalments from 1924 onwards under the holding title fragments from Work in Progress. The real title stayed secret until publication day.
The base language is English. It is not ordinary English. Joyce bent it, split it and fused it with words from many other languages until he had built an idiom of his own. Many commentators read this as an attempt to reproduce the way memory works in sleep, where people, places and words slide into one another and refuse to stay separate. The setting is given in the opening lines as Howth Castle and Environs, which is to say Dublin and its surroundings.
At the centre is a family named Earwicker. A rumour attaches itself to the father. What exactly he is supposed to have done is never clear, and the details shift every time the subject comes up. His wife sets out to clear his name by means of a letter. His sons set about trying to take his place. The book closes with the mother speaking alone as dawn arrives.
The structure is seventeen chapters across four Books. Book I has eight chapters, Books II and III have four each, and Book IV is a single short chapter. The chapters have no titles. Critics refer to them by part and number, so III.2 means the second chapter of the third part.
The main characters
Readers and scholars disagree about a great deal in this book, but there is broad agreement about the cast. HCE is the father, the figure the rumour settles on. ALP is the mother, the one who writes or commissions the letter meant to exonerate him. They have three children. Shem the Penman is the writer. Shaun the Postman is the carrier and deliverer. Issy is the daughter.
The introductory chapter also brings in Finnegan, a Dublin hod carrier who falls to his death from a ladder while building a wall. That fall sits behind the whole book.
One warning worth repeating. The crucial events, HCE's supposed crime and ALP's letter, are talked about endlessly but never witnessed directly. The reader does not see them happen. Because the details keep changing, they stay unknown, and arguably unknowable. That is the design, not a failure of it.
The themes
Dreaming is the organising idea. Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver in 1926 that a great part of every human existence passes in a state that cannot be rendered by what he called wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. The book is his attempt at a language for that other state.
Identity runs alongside it. Characters are not stable. They merge, swap roles and reappear under altered names. A father is also a city, a hill, a fallen builder. Family is the frame that holds it together: a husband accused, a wife defending, sons competing to succeed him, a daughter watching. Death and renewal are built into the shape of the thing, starting from a fall and a wake and turning towards morning.
Joyce was clear that none of this was arbitrary. Richard Ellmann quotes him saying he could justify every line. To Sisley Huddleston he said that twenty pages of chapter I.8 had cost him twelve hundred hours. Asked whether the published sketches were consecutive and interrelated, he answered that it was all consecutive and interrelated.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you would rather meet it cold. The novel ends mid sentence with the fragment "a way a lone a last a loved a long the". The opening line completes it: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Joyce said the book ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. The last page sends you back to the first. The whole thing is a circle.
Why it still matters
The first reception was mostly hostile. Reviewers were baffled by the language or angry at what they took to be pointlessness and disrespect for the rules of fiction. It has kept its reputation as one of the hardest works in literature.
It has also kept its readers. Scholars such as Bernard Benstock, David Hayman and Fritz Senn have argued that forcing the Wake into a narrative mould misses what it does, and that tidy plot summaries leave out the difficult parts and recycle what we already assume. Critics have pointed to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as a precedent for Joyce's layered, digressive method. Joyce said he could easily have written the story the traditional way, since every novelist knows the recipe, but that he was trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way.
It suits readers who enjoy language as material rather than as a window, who like puzzles, and who are content to read a passage aloud for its sound before working out its sense. It is not a book to be finished so much as one to be visited.
