Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake enters Esther Greenwood’s plans as both a demanding work of literature and a possible companion to an imagined academic future. She thinks she will spend the summer reading it and writing her thesis, hoping to get ahead before college resumes at the end of September. Yet when she tries to read the book, its circular opening and distorted language resist her efforts to make stable sense of them. Her encounter ends not in mastery but in a decision to abandon the thesis and the honors program, making the novel a sharply concrete measure of the gulf between the future she has planned and the attention she can command.

Place in Esther’s Plans

Esther imagines the book as part of a productive summer: reading Finnegans Wake while writing her thesis would put her ahead when college began again at the end of September. She pictures this preparation as a way to enjoy her final year instead of joining the honors students who, she thinks, work themselves down with no makeup and stringy hair, sustained by coffee and Benzedrine until their theses are done. The plan is distinctly practical, even as its chosen reading is famously demanding: the novel is meant to fit into a larger scheme for controlling the pace and conditions of her academic life.

That scheme does not hold still. Esther also thinks she may defer college for a year and apprentice herself to a pottery maker; she has already imagined putting off her own novel until she has gone to Europe and had a lover, and avoiding shorthand so that she will never have to use it. Finnegans Wake thus belongs to a shifting set of projected futures rather than to a settled course of study. It is one more ambitious undertaking in a mind actively rearranging what comes next.

The Reading Encounter

Esther reads while lying in bed, with the thick book making an unpleasant dent in her stomach. She tries the opening, “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. . .” The lowercase beginning prompts a tentative interpretation: perhaps nothing ever starts entirely anew, with a capital letter, but instead flows on from what precedes it. “Eve and Adam’s” reverses the familiar order of Adam and Eve; Esther wonders whether the phrase may also refer to a pub in Dublin. Her response is not simple incomprehension. She tests possibilities, but cannot establish which, if any, will unlock the passage.

The scale and sound of the writing intensify the difficulty. Esther asks herself why there should be a hundred letters, then tries the long word aloud. It seems to her like a heavy wooden object falling downstairs, a sequence of impacts, “boomp boomp boomp,” step after step. As she fans the pages past her eyes, words that seem dimly familiar appear twisted out of shape and leave no impression on her mind. The book’s language is encountered at once as visual pattern and sound, but those impressions do not cohere into a meaning she can retain.

Her perception of the page grows more estranged. Letters seem to sprout barbs and rams’ horns; she watches them separate and jiggle, then join into fantastic shapes she cannot translate. The comparison to Arabic or Chinese describes the distance the writing has opened between visible marks and intelligible words in Esther’s experience. The scene makes the act of reading physical and immediate: the book presses against her body while its writing refuses to settle in her mind.

Abandoning the Thesis

After this encounter, Esther decides to junk her thesis. She then resolves to leave the entire honors program and become an ordinary English major, only to find that this alternative has its own requirements, including a course in the eighteenth century that she has skipped. She dislikes the prospect of studying writers she associates with smugness, neat couplets, and an excessive devotion to reason. The detour exposes a practical consequence of the decision: leaving honors does not instantly open an uncomplicated route elsewhere, because the ordinary major has requirements she has not met.

The contrast also clarifies the role of the book in this moment. Finnegans Wake had been included in a plan that promised Esther academic advantage; when she cannot read it, she abandons the thesis rather than pressing through the difficulty. Her previous freedom in the honors program had allowed her to spend much of her time on Dylan Thomas, but that flexibility has not ensured that she will complete the work now expected of her. The abandoned reading and abandoned thesis converge, while the search for a different academic path reveals how little the available choices resemble the clean fresh start she had imagined.

Form and Significance

The novel’s opening offers Esther a pattern of return: she reads its long opening sentence as potentially suggesting that nothing begins wholly new but flows on from what came before. That tentative idea sits beside her own succession of fresh plans—thesis, ordinary major, a year away, pottery apprenticeship—without resolving them into a single direction. The book’s circular language therefore acquires significance through the scene of reading, not through any claim that Esther has mastered its design: she can glimpse a possible principle of recurrence even as the words themselves become unreadable to her.

The episode gives the difficulty of Finnegans Wake two connected forms. Esther can hear the long word’s heavy, descending rhythm and see the letters changing into strange shapes, yet sound and sight fail to produce a lasting impression or a secure interpretation. This gap between noticing and understanding makes the attempt a measure of her present limits, while her immediate decision to discard the thesis gives that limit a consequence in the plot. The novel remains less a completed intellectual achievement than a charged item in a summer plan that breaks apart under the pressure of reading it.