Finnegans Wake

Part 4 of Finnegans Wake is the shortest of the four parts. Throughout this section, ALP’s voice comes to the foreground. The novel ends with an extended narration from ALP’s perspective, resembling the letter that she dictated to Shem ahead of her husband’s trial. ALP defends her husband, but her reflections on their time together expand until she too becomes a part of the continuing cycle of life, death, history, and myth that defines HCE. Whereas HCE has previously been compared to the city of Dublin, ALP explicitly compares herself to the River Liffey, which flows through the city. The river is a fitting metaphor for her role in the novel. She provides sustenance and life to her family and husband, just as a river allows a city to function. Like the river, she flows continuously; the water changes, but the river stays the same, just as ALP changes but remains the same. She is fixed and immovable, flowing and mutating: everything at the same time, just as the rest of her family inhabit various roles and identities throughout the novel. ALP gives life to her family as the river gives life to the city, so she eventually transforms into the river itself and becomes the totalizing metaphor for the novel itself. ALP becomes a literary figure and a fixture of Dublin, just as Finnegans Wake describes Dublin as the literary embodiment of history’s ever-flowing cycle of change and rebirth.

ALP and her role as the river extend a key feature of Finnegans Wake, in which characters blend, overlap, and merge together throughout history and the present. As the River Liffey, ALP is separate from her husband, who is also the city of Dublin. However, their histories and futures are so deeply entwined as to be inseparable. ALP’s memories of walking with her husband are activities they have shared and times when their past has blended together and formed them into a single unit. As a couple, they are one. Similarly, the Liffey and Dublin cannot be separated. The river’s course shapes Dublin; the river runs through it and dictates the city’s geography and infrastructure. They are inseparable in this respect, in that the water in the river can exist elsewhere, but it will not be the Liffey, while the buildings and people of the city could be anywhere else, but then that place would not become Dublin. The city and the river are intertwined, just as ALP and HCE are bound together in their cycle of sleeping, waking, living, and dying. They are each other, as well as themselves, the city, the river, and everything else.