Ulysses 100

How to Read Finnegans Wake

James Joyce’s most perplexing text isn’t as hard as you think!

A first edition of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and an 11th printing Ulysses (1930) in a window display at Ulysses Rare Books in Dublin. Photo taken by the author, 2018.

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s notoriously perplexing final book from 1939, takes beginning in medias res to a whole new level. Its first line dumps the reader into the middle of Dublin’s murky River Liffey, starting the story literally mid-stream:

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.

A reader unfamiliar with the Wake might wonder if I’ve misquoted here, omitting the first word or neglecting to capitalize the already-puzzling compound “riverrun.” I have not: Finnegans Wake opens lowercase, mid-sentence, mid-thought. If one makes it all the way through Joyce’s cryptic text, they’ll see why. The closing sentence of the Wake’s final chapter reads —

A way a lone a lost a last a loved along the

— to which one might think to add, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, [etc.],” making the whole book a circle. You could start reading the book from anywhere, the start of any chapter, in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of…