ABSTRACT
Finnegans Wake is James Joyce's fourth book of fiction, and the first in which he does not formally appear as a character. Whether as the boyish ‘I’ who peers through the first stories in Dubliners, or the gangling, desperately proud Stephen Dedalus who bestrides A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Joyce has played the paramount role in his own fiction. In a very real sense his books have been the saga of James Joyce; they have offered a confession, staggering in its concentrated intensity of the mind of Stephen Dedalus as agonist and lay priest, intellectual and lover, infidel and poet.
