Most readers of Finnegans Wake would probably hesitate to call it a novel, and one of the reasons for this reluctance is that it lacks anything that could unproblematically be called a narrative, something which even such exceptional texts as Tristram Shandy and Ulysses, for all their oddity, can be said to possess. Yet narrative is hardly absent from the Wake; indeed, in the words of the text itself, at one of its many auto-descriptive moments, ‘Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirl-worlds’ (FW 17.26). Finnegans Wake is a great mound of stories, a gigantic accumulation of the world's narratives, but it seems that it is not one of them.

To explore this paradox, it will help to establish a working definition of narrative: let us say that it is a linear (though often multilevelled) account of recognizable characters and events, engaging with the reader's pre-existing mental schemata to arouse expectations, and to modify, complicate, defeat, or partially satisfy those expectations, arriving at full satisfaction – or something like it – only at the end (thereby constituting it as the end). Individual narratives work in different ways to produce pleasure and perhaps some form of understanding or insight, but what they all have in common is the condition of being narratives, of engaging with the world and the mind in the specific manner of narrative.