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THE 
NARRATIVE 
STRUCTURE 
 THE FUNCTION OF REPETITION 
 No better description of reading Finnegans Wake can be found than William
York Tindall's comment on the hen's letter scratched from the dump: "for
the first time we get a look at the text, such as it is, word for word, letter
by letter. Our problem is what to make of what we have looked at."1 To make
something of what we have looked at, we irresistibly turn to familiar concepts
of structure for a key to the "chaosmos" of Finnegans Wake. Intuitively,
the reader may sense that these familiar notions of structure do not apply
to this work, yet our entire epistemology has taught us to think of structure
in terms of "anchors" or points of reference that constitute a center of
the work. 
 Two predominant models have governed attempts to define the Wake's structure.
The first, despite Joyce's disavowal of structural similarities between Finnegans
Wake and Ulysses, is the familiar plan of Ulysses, which brought that work
into such immediate focus after the publication of Stuart Gilbert's book,
James Joyce's "Ulysses." The second model, apparently sanctioned by Joyce
via Samuel Beckett's essay in Our Exagmination, is a scheme of cyclical recurrence
based on the Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico. The Ulyssean plan is anchored
on a naturalistic narrative line, Bloom's day in Dublin. A corresponding
literal line, a day in the life of Dublin pubkeeper H. C. Earwicker, serves