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: