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Concept
Finnegans Wake
Summary
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language which blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to create a refracted effect. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [...] with the work of analysis and deconstruction"; many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text. Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce declared that "every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake has been agreed to be a work largely unread by the general public.
Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive. The book explores, in an unorthodox fashion, the lives of the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making it cyclical.
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