II

Here begins Book II of Finnegans Wake. While Book I was generally the story of the parents, HCE and ALP, and took place largely in the (distant &am ash; perhaps prehistoric) past, Book II will take place primarily in the present and will focus on the children, Shem, Shaun, and Issy.

It is also, per critical consensus, the most difficult and opaque of Finnegans Wake's four books. Scholar and FW commentator William York Tindall has written of its four chapters that "than these [...] nothing is denser."