Category:Mythological figures

A listing of mythological characters, artifacts, themes, and names used in FW.

Joyce used an abundant amount of mythological references throughout Finnegans Wake. Characters and stories from Ancient Greek, Roman, Irish, Norse and Egyptian mythology are some of the more prevelant. Joseph Campbell, who was greatly influenced by Joyce, once said that “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths." When the reader takes Finnegans Wake as being a "Book of the Night", a narration of a dream, we can see where Joyce has taken thousands of dream and myth archetypes and brought them all together in this one story of Finnegan, the "everyman", what Campbell later described as "monomyth".