Chapter begins with a description of Shem's ancestry Numbers signify page.line:paragraph, with '0' used for a paragraph that began on the previous page. Something which may help you work through what is a difficult chapter. Of course, none of that is involved in what follows, which is merely an outline, a reading guide for the narrative flow of the chapter. I say that because in examining 1.7, it seems that it is here that there is the first real anchoring of the 'story' of Finnegans Wake (insofar as it is a 'story'). Indeed, I have, also on and off, carried the tentative idea that Finnegans Wake is the dream of an older Stephen Dedalus, of Stephen Dedalus during or after the writing of his greatest work, which is itself Finnegans Wake. My thought is that it is, actually, Shem that is the central figure of the book: central in the sense of being the axis around which the book turns, even though he is not himself present in much of the text.

While I don't think I could yet make a true argument to the point, it has been my thought, here and there, on and off, that there is something false about saying Finnegans Wake is about HCE. Though, it is also about James Joyce himself as a writer and Irish expatriot, as well as about the books that lead up to Finnegans Wake: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, most greatly, Ulysses. Chapter 1.7 of Finnegans Wake centers on Shem the Penman, one of the twin sons of HCE and ALP.

Finnegans wake chapter 1