Joyce-Merchant

Finnigans Wake by James Joyce was a very tough read for me due to its nature of made up words and numerous allusions to biblical stories. I have never studied the bible so many of the reference Joyce makes in his writings remain unknown to me which makes the story even harder to read. In between the crazy language that Joyce uses while writing Finnigans Wake we see that he heavily relies on Polysemy to add depth to the words he uses. One example from the text where this is evident is on page 4 when he says “What true feeling for their's hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup!” there are a few words here where polysemy is at play. Hayair could be hair or hair that literally feels like hay. Strawng could be pointing to the strength of the hair or the type of hay or the strength of the hiccup. I feel like there are a lot of underlying messages behind Joyce’s work which is not something we have encountered when we read Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland. The polysemy that Carol used served more of a purpose to merely fit a pattern or rhyme rather than actually add any meaning to the sentence it was used in. For example there is one chapter in the book where Alice and her friends have been soaked and need to dry off. But when the mouse says he knows how to he can make everyone dry again he starts quoting one of the driest speeches he can remember. Alice literally needed to dry off because she was wet but the mouse took it as they wanted to hear a dry story with very little emotion and animation. Joyce uses polysemy to make deep connections within the text while nonsense authors we studied before this have used polysemy for the purpose of taking away meaning and common sense from their works because that is what they wanted to portray.