ABSTRACT
Baffled readers can sense, however, some hint of failure in working on Vico’s theory. All the attributes of mankind? Here as in his other writings, in Ulysses and as far back as Dubliners, Joyce’s people are all ‘dead end’ people, he sees men and women only on the seamy or the ridiculous side, people who are beyond the possibilities of a finer life. He observes them clearly and with an animation of interest that often breaks through the barriers of speech, but he observes them only as a spectacle of fun or of disgust. There is no tragic vision of their fate, no sentiment, no background of a sense of good or evil. Stephen Dedalus said in Ulysses. ‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can.’ Joyce confessed himself through Dedalus in The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as well as in Ulysses. And what is the final confession in Finnegans Wake? ‘To see life foully’ is a pointed expression used there. And that is not to see life whole.
