Finnegans Wake is a work of fiction by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.[1][2] Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words to unique effect. Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.[3] Owing to the work's linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.[4][5]Difficulties of plot summaryEdit
“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...[84]”
Commentators who have summarised the plot of Finnegans Wake include Joseph Campbell, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess, William York Tindall, and Philip Kitcher. While no two summaries interpret the plot in the same way, there are a number of central "plot points" upon which they find general agreement. A number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of searching for a linear storyline within the complex text. As Bernard Benstock highlights, "in a work where every sentence opens a variety of possible interpretations, any synopsis of a chapter is bound to be incomplete."[85] David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold."[86] The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock to warn against the danger of "boiling down" Finnegans Wake into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases."[87] Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses, saying "we have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest."[88]

The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of Finnegans Wake lies not only in the opacity of the book's language, but also in the radical approach to plot which Joyce employed. Joyce acknowledged this when he wrote to Eugène Jolas that:

"I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner [...] Every novelist knows the recipe [...] It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand [...] But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way.[89]

This "new way" of telling a story in Finnegans Wake takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in the absence of a discernible linear narrative, causing Herring to argue that the plot of Finnegans Wake "is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists, told from varying perspectives."[90] Patrick A. McCarthy expands on this idea of a non-linear, digressive narrative with the contention that "throughout much of Finnegans Wake, what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details."[91] In other words, while crucial plot points – such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter – are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences.