This paper does not purport to offer a psychoanalytic reading of Finne
gans Wake, but rather to demonstrate how, in recreating the mechanisms
of the dream, Joyce's masterpiece offers to psychoanalysis a uniquely
rich opportunity to explore the shadowy play of the dream in the perm
anence of a work of art. In particular, the manner in which Finnegans
Wake tells its story through the distortions of dream narrative while
bodying forth its protagonists in the substitutions of dream-identity
are explored, with the help of certain Freudian and Lacanian concepts
of unconscious structure.