ABSTRACT
The narrative technique of this chapter has been described as that of a lecture, and the subject of the lecture as the scrutiny and identification of what is variously described by the narrator as a 'proteiform graph'. In view of the various controversies that have surrounded James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and in the light of recent debate about modes of representation in literature, self-reflexivity and foregrounding of language, it seems an appropriate moment to consider how people might read the book. The real issue for the reader of Finnegans Wake is the extent to which a knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and, in particular, the psychology of dreams is necessary equipment for reading the text. The opening of Finnegans Wake offers a mixture of the familiar and the disconcerting. Rhetorical elements in the syntax tend to encourage the reader to begin a process of character-building, in keeping with the personality traits associated with the rhetorical flourishes.
