In the final two chapters of Part I, we learn more about the letter’s writer Shem the Penman (I.7) and its original author, his mother ALP (I.8). The Shem chapter consists of «Shaun’s character assassination of his brother Shem», describing the hermetic artist as a forger and a «sham», before «Shem is protected by his mother [ALP], who appears at the end to come and defend her son.» The following chapter concerning Shem’s mother, known as «Anna Livia Plurabelle», is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, and is widely considered the book’s most celebrated passage.
The chapter was described by Joyce in 1924 as «a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone.» These two washerwomen gossip about ALP’s response to the allegations laid against her husband HCE, as they wash clothes in the River Liffey. ALP is said to have written a letter declaring herself tired of her mate. Their gossip then digresses to her youthful affairs and sexual encounters, before returning to the publication of HCE’s guilt in the morning newspaper, and his wife’s revenge on his enemies: borrowing a «mailsack» from her son Shaun the Post, she delivers presents to her 111 children. At the chapter’s close, the washerwomen try to pick up the thread of the story, but their conversation is increasingly difficult as they are on opposite sides of the widening Liffey, and it is getting dark. Finally, as they turn into a tree and a stone, they ask to be told a Tale of Shem or Shaun.
Part II
While Part I of Finnegans Wake deals mostly with the parents HCE and ALP, Part II shifts that focus to their children, Shem, Shaun and Issy.
II.1 opens with a pantomime programme, which outlines, in relatively clear language, the identities and attributes of the book’s main characters. The chapter then concerns a guessing game among the children, in which Shem is challenged three times to guess by «gazework» the colour which the girls have chosen. Unable to answer due to his poor eyesight, Shem goes into exile in disgrace, and Shaun wins the affection of the girls. Finally, HCE emerges from the pub and in a thunder-like voice calls the children inside.
Chapter II.2 follows Shem, Shaun and Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter. The chapter depicts «[Shem] coaching [Shaun] how to do Euclid Bk I, 1», structured as «a reproduction of a schoolboys’ (and schoolgirls’) old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides at half time, and footnotes by the girl (who doesn’t)». Once Shem (here called Dolph) has helped Shaun (here called Kev) to draw the Euclid diagram, the latter realises that he has drawn a diagram of ALP’s genitalia, and «Kev finally realises the significance of the triangles [..and..] strikes Dolph.» After this «Dolph forgives Kev» and the children are given «essay assignments on 52 famous men.» The chapter ends with the children’s «nightletter» to HCE and ALP, in which they are «apparently united in a desire to overcome their parents.»
«Section 1: a radio broadcast of the tale of Pukkelsen (a hunchbacked Norwegian Captain), Kersse (a tailor) and McCann (a ship’s husband) in which the story is told inter alia of how HCE met and married ALP.
Sections 2–3: an interruption in which Kate (the cleaning woman) tells HCE that he is wanted upstairs, the door is closed and the tale of Buckley is introduced.
Sections 4–5: the tale, recounted by Butt and Taff (Shem and Shaun) and beamed over the television, of how Buckley shot the Russian General (HCE)
Danis Rose’s overview of the extremely complex chapter 2.3, which he believes takes place in the bar of Earwicker’s hotel»
II.3 moves to HCE working in the pub below the studying children. As HCE serves his customers, two narratives are broadcast via the bar’s radio and television sets, namely «The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor’s Daughter», and «How Buckley Shot the Russian General». The first portrays HCE as a Norwegian Captain succumbing to domestication through his marriage to the Tailor’s Daughter. The latter, told by Shem and Shaun ciphers Butt and Taff, casts HCE as a Russian General who is shot by Buckley, an Irish soldier in the British army during the Crimean War.
Earwicker has been absent throughout the latter tale, having been summoned upstairs by ALP. He returns and is reviled by his customers, who see Buckley’s shooting of the General as symbolic of Shem and Shaun’s supplanting their father. This condemnation of his character forces HCE to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls. Finally a policeman arrives to send the drunken customers home, the pub is closed up, and the customers disappear singing into the night as a drunken HCE, clearing up the bar and swallowing the dregs of the glasses left behind, morphs into ancient Irish high king Rory O’Connor, and passes out.
II.4, portraying the drunken and sleeping Earwicker’s dream, chronicles the spying of four old men (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) on Tristan and Iseult’s journey. The short chapter portrays «an old man like King Mark being rejected and abandoned by young lovers who sail off into a future without him», while the four old men observe Tristan and Isolde, and offer four intertwining commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are «always repeating themselves».
Part III
Part III concerns itself almost exclusively with Shaun, in his role as postman, having to deliver ALP’s letter, which was referred to in Part I but never seen.
III.1 opens with the Four Masters’ ass narrating how he thought, as he was «dropping asleep», he had heard and seen an apparition of Shaun the Post. As a result, Shaun re-awakens and, floating down the Liffey in a barrel, is posed fourteen questions concerning the significance and content of the letter he is carrying. Shaun, «apprehensive about being slighted, is on his guard, and the placating narrators never get a straight answer out of him.» Shaun’s answers focus on his own boastful personality and his admonishment of the letter’s author – his artist brother Shem. The answer to the eighth question contains the story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, another framing of the Shaun-Shem relationship. After the inquisition Shaun loses his balance and the barrel in which he has been floating careens over and he rolls backwards out of the narrator’s earshot, before disappearing completely from view.
In III.2 Shaun re-appears as «Jaunty Jaun» and delivers a lengthy and sexually suggestive sermon to his sister Issy, and her twenty-eight schoolmates from St. Brigid’s School. Throughout this book Shaun is continually regressing, changing from an old man to an overgrown baby lying on his back, and eventually, in III.3, into a vessel through which the voice of HCE speaks again by means of a spiritual medium. This leads to HCE’s defence of his life in the passage «Haveth Childers Everywhere».
Part III ends in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Porter as they attempt to copulate while their children, Jerry, Kevin and Isobel Porter, are sleeping upstairs and the dawn is rising outside (III.4). Jerry awakes from a nightmare of a scary father figure, and Mrs. Porter interrupts the coitus to go comfort him with the words «You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one.» She returns to bed, and the rooster crows at the conclusion of their coitus at the Part’s culmination.
Part IV
«1: The waking and resurrection of [HCE]; 2: the sunrise; 3: the conflict of night and day; 4: the attempt to ascertain the correct time; 5: the terminal point of the regressive time and the [Shaun] figure of Part III; 6: the victory of day over night; 7: the letter and monologue of [ALP]
– Roland McHugh’s summary of the events of Part IV
Part IV consists of only one chapter, which, like the book’s opening chapter, is mostly composed of a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes. After an opening call for dawn to break, the remainder of the chapter consists of the vignettes «Saint Kevin», «Berkely and Patrick» and «The Revered Letter». ALP is given the final word, as the book closes on a version of her Letter and her final long monologue, in which she tries to wake her sleeping husband, declaring «Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!», and remembers a walk they once took, and hopes for its re-occurrence. At the close of her monologue, ALP – as the river Liffey – disappears at dawn into the ocean. The book’s last words are a fragment, but they can be turned into a complete sentence by attaching them to the words that start the book:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings
