Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its allusive and experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature. In 1924, it began to appear in installments under the title «fragments from Work in Progress». The final title was only revealed when the book was published on 4 May 1939.

The initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable was justified.

Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many languages into his own distinctive idiom. Some commentators believe this technique was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the way that memories, people, and places are mixed together and transformed in a dreaming or half-awakened state.

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. The book explores 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 follows his wife’s attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons’ struggle to replace him, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. Emphasizing its cyclical structure, the novel ends with an unfinished line that completes the fragment with which it began.
Background and composition

Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923, he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Weaver: «Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them.» This is the earliest reference to what would become Finnegans Wake.

The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch «Roderick O’Conor», concerning the historic last king of Ireland cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as «Tristan and Isolde», «Saint Patrick and the Druid», «Kevin’s Orisons», and «Mamalujo». While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into Finnegans Wake in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch «Here Comes Everybody», which dealt for the first time with the book’s protagonist HCE.

Over the next few years, Joyce’s method became one of «increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since he obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook.» As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure.

By 1926, Joyce had largely completed both Parts I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that Part I had, at this early stage, «a real focus that had developed out of the HCE [«Here Comes Everybody»] sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP’s letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts […] formed a unity.» In the same year, Joyce met Maria and Eugène Jolas in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in The Dial’s refusal to publish the four chapters of Part III in September 1926. The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing Finnegans Wake, and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine transition, under the title Work in Progress. For the next few years, Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex.

By this time, some early supporters of Joyce’s work, such as Ezra Pound and the author’s brother Stanislaus Joyce, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing. In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce’s supporters (including Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Rebecca West, and others) put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens about the possibility of Stephens completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had «explained to [Stephens] all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself, heart and soul, to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth.» Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus. In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book.

In the 1930s, as he was writing Parts II and IV, Joyce’s progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Stanislaus Joyce in 1931; concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia; and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight.

Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after seventeen years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died twenty months later in Zürich, on 13 January 1941.

Plot

The entire work forms a cycle, the book ending with the sentence-fragment «a way a lone a last a loved a long the» and beginning by finishing that sentence: «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 himself revealed that the book «ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.»

«In the first chapter of Finnegans Wake Joyce describes the fall of the primordial giant Finnegan and his awakening as the modern family man and pub owner H.C.E.» Donald Phillip Verene’s summary and interpretation of the Wake’s episodic opening chapter.

The introductory chapter (I.1) establishes the book’s setting as «Howth Castle and Environs» (i.e. the Dublin area), and introduces Dublin hod carrier «Finnegan», who falls to his death from a ladder while constructing a wall. Finnegan’s wife Annie puts out his corpse as a meal spread for the mourners at his wake, but he vanishes before they can eat him. A series of episodic vignettes follows, loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as «The Willingdone Museyroom», «Mutt and Jute», and «The Prankquean». At the chapter’s close a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan’s corpse, and «the dead Finnegan rises from his coffin bawling for whiskey and his mourners put him back to rest», persuading him that he is better off where he is. The chapter ends with the image of the HCE character sailing into Dublin Bay to take a central role in the story.

I.2 opens with an account of «Harold or Humphrey» Chimpden receiving the nickname «Earwicker» from the Sailor King, who encounters him attempting to catch earwigs with an inverted flowerpot on a stick while manning a tollgate through which the King is passing. This name helps Chimpden, now known by his initials HCE, to rise to prominence in Dublin society as «Here Comes Everybody». He is then brought low by a rumour that begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in the Phoenix Park, although details of HCE’s transgression change with each retelling of events.

Chapters I.2 through I.4 follow the progress of this rumour, starting with HCE’s encounter with «a cad with a pipe» in Phoenix Park. The cad greets HCE in Gaelic and asks the time, but HCE misunderstands the question as an accusation, and incriminates himself by denying rumours the cad has not yet heard. These rumours quickly spread across Dublin, gathering momentum until they are turned into a song penned by the character Hosty called «The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly». As a result, HCE goes into hiding, where he is besieged at the closed gate of his pub by a visiting American looking for a drink after hours. HCE remains silent – not responding to the accusations or verbal abuse – dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of Lough Neagh, and is finally brought to trial, under the name Festy King. He is eventually freed, and goes once more into hiding. An important piece of evidence during the trial – a letter about HCE written by his wife ALP – is called for so that it can be examined in closer detail.

ALP’s letter becomes the focal point as it is