Use in Literature
"Finnegan's Wake" is famous for providing the basis of James Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake (1939), in which the comic resurrection of Tim Finnegan is employed as a symbol of the universal cycle of life. As whiskey, the "water of life", causes both Finnegan's death and resurrection in the ballad, so the word "wake" also represents both a passing (into death) and a rising (from sleep). Joyce removed the apostrophe in the title of his novel in order to suggest an active process in which a multiplicity of "Finnegans", that is, all members of humanity, fall and then wake and arise.
"Finnegan's Wake" is also featured as the climax of the primary storyline in Philip José Farmer's award-winning novella, Riders of the Purple Wage.
A scene very similar to that of Finnegan's Wake is present in The Shipping News, when the character Jack Buggit is presumed to have drowned after being caught in the rope of a lobster pot, only for him to regain consciousness at his wake.
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Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“This is not “writing” at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)