L. Boom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake

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Abstract
It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.

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