Finnegans Wake

In case you got bogged down and missed the plot, Thornton Wilder helpfully summarizes what he describes as Joyce’s “Night Book”: “We overhear and oversee [the hero] in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin.  His conscience is trying him for some obscure misdemeanors committed – or perhaps only partially envisaged – during the day.  He is in disgrace.  He identifies himself with Lucifer fallen from Heaven, Adam ejected from Paradise, Napoleon defeated at Waterloo, Finnegan of the old ballad laid out for his wake.  It is the Book of Falls, and as the night advances he plunges deeper and relives all the crimes of which man is capable; he stands trial (the very constellations of the night sky are sitting in judgment).  He submits his defense and extenuation.  Finally dawn arrives; the sun climbs through the transom of the Earwickers’ bedroom.  The last chapter is a wonderful sunburst of Handelian rhetoric; all the resurrection myths of the world are recalled along with Pears’ soap advertisements and the passing trains and the milkman.  The phoenix is reborn; Everyman re-awakes.”  All this written in “a language in which all the tongues of the world have coalesced into a pate , the barriers between them having become imperceptible at that level.”

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