Bygmester
- bygmester: (Danish) builder; master builder; prime contractor
- Bygmester Solness: The Master Builder, a play by Henrik Ibsen; in the final scene, the eponymous character Halvard Solness climbs to the top of a tower, but falls to his death
- big mister → contrasted with pygmy
- pygmy → contrasted with big mister
- Bürgermeister: (German) mayor → cf. the Burgomaster in Whale's Frankenstein movies
- bug-master → Earwicker; insect/incest; → The Ondt & the Gracehoper (FW 416.03 ff.) → Blake's Vala, Night the Ninth, features in one paragraph: earthworm, beetle, emmet, centipede, spider, EARWIG, maggot, and GRASSHOPPER; → Beelzebub, meaning: 'Lord of the Flies'; → the Egyptian scarab, symbolizing transformation, also a reference to the Book of the Dead (or rather: of Life); → immigration: "Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs" [Ulysses, Cyclops]; → "Ahab's soul is a centipede" [Melville, Moby Dick]
- bugge: (Middle English) a "frightening spectre" (cf. boggart, bogeyman)
- böögg: puppet being burned in the celebration of Zurich's Sechseläuten (cf. "Mester Begge (...) saxonlootie" p. 58)
- bigamy-master: one who has many affairs, hence the surronding theme of guilt.
Commentary
After the preludial nature of the first four paragraphs, the fifth paragraph represents a second beginning. Compare this to the Book of Genesis, which also has two beginnings (Gen 1:1 and Gen 2:4), and to Ulysses, which likewise has two beginnings (Telemachus and Calypso).
According to Campbell's Skeleton Key, the first four paragraphs form the preludium, alright. But it can be argued that it's rather the first six paragraphs:
The first two (from "riverrun..." to "...aquaface") might be Finnegan's wake in nuce (also of a cyclic structure);
Then Joyce starts again four times in the following four paragraphs, according Vico's cycles:
- "The fall..." (cf. the beginning of the Iliad: menin, the central subject is the first word): theocratic age,
- "What clashes here of wills gen wonts..." (like a heroic poem): aristocratic age,
- "Bygmester Finnegan..." (like a biography): democratic age,
- "Of the first was he..." (vine/vinegar; morm/eve; come/send): ricorso.]
Parallels are drawn between Finnegan's personal history and the history of the Israelites, just as the Book of Invasions (a medieval corpus Irish myth and pseudo-history) models the prehistory of the Irish race on the Biblical history of the Israelites. The Biblical overtones are underscored by the allusions to the first seven books of the Old Testament (the Heptateuch): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges. Finnegan is compared to Moses, both making large bodies of liquid disappear! Both have speech impediments (Exodus 4:10).
