James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is considered one of the most difficult works in the English language. This guide provides readers with valuable insights and a “skeleton key” to unraveling the elaborate wordplay and complex writing style Joyce employed. Campbell and Robinson illuminate the web of allegories, allusions, ambiguities, and puns woven throughout Joyce’s masterpiece. They explain the novel’s dreamlike narrative structure, decode its multilingual word puzzles, and reveal the layers of meaning in its symbolic system based on Viconian cyclic history. Though Joyce’s methods are obscure, this key helps readers appreciate Finnegans Wake as an innovative, poetic, and humorous work of genius.