I recently finished watching the television series Better Call Saul. It was an excellent show that, in my estimation, exceeded its predecessor, the acclaimed Breaking Bad. Neither show is on the level of The Sopranos, but Better Call Saul had more interesting character moments than Breaking Bad and more compelling acting (especially from Rhea Seehorn, who was outstanding).

Concentrating on these elements of the show, I could not help but think about Finnegans Wake as I watched the “Brother Battle” — which is so central to Joyce’s novel — play out in Jimmy McGill’s (Saul’s) conflict with his brother, Chuck. And the role of Kim reminded me of the function of Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Wake, she who “gave him keen and made him able” (a pun that unites a reference to the battling brothers Cain and Abel with the keening of a widow and the encouragement of an enabler).

This post will discuss Better Call Saul in the context of the archetypes of Finnegan Wake. As such, it will contain spoilers for the show, and I recommend you view the entire series before reading the remainder of this post.

For those readers less familiar with Finnegans Wake, one of the major themes of the novel is sometimes referred to as the “Brother Battle.” The Wake is a unique literary work written in a confusing pseudo-English language invented by Joyce in an attempt to mimic the disorienting experience of dreaming. Whoever is dreaming this novel appears within the dream as a man named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Earwicker or HCE for short. These initials signify his everyman status, since they also mean “Here Comes Everybody.” As the dream progresses, HCE splits into two other characters: in some tellings, he is vanquished by a younger version of himself (who often spreads destructive rumors about him), and he is replaced by two characters who represent the sides of his personality (or, alternatively, two personality types common to most times and places, two sides of Here Comes Everybody).

These two “brothers” represent various opposites. One (often called “Shaun” or “Kevin”) is an extroverted authority figure who promotes morality and justice. The other (usually called “Shem” or “Jerry”) is an introverted creative figure who is frequently spurned or disparaged by others. Broadly, we could associate the former with the Freudian superego (the conscience, the part of the self that has internalized the rules of society) and the latter with the id (the base impulses that fuel our desires and that are sublimated into art, but that are often antisocial). Shaun represents various kinds of figures like priests, politicians, and police officers; Shem stands for mystics, activists, and rule-breaking rebels. While Shem is usually considered the “artist” of the two (and is sometimes presented in ways that parody James Joyce himself), both practice different kinds of art, and both are jealous rivals of each other.

Viewers of Better Call Saul will see where I’m going with this. Chuck McGill is a Shaun type, while Jimmy McGill is a Shem. Chuck is, or at least presents himself as, a morally upstanding figure who reveres the law. Jimmy is a conniving con artist who manipulates other people and the law to get what he wants. But even in Better Call Saul we can see an illustration of one of Joyce’s subtle points: these “contrary” forces are less polar opposites than different aspects of the same force; they share many of the same characteristics, even as the broad kinds of personality traits they represent exist, in different degrees and combinations, in all people. Chuck imagines himself to be a devout worshipper of the law, but he too uses it for his own purposes, especially to hamper Jimmy (at one point, practically to extort him; Jimmy points this out, but Chuck won’t admit it). As a lawyer, Jimmy at times circumvents the letter of the law with scams that recall his criminal youth (as “Slippin Jimmy”), but he many times, especially early in the series, does so for purposes that he would say are ethical (such as when he steals the Kettlemans’ stolen money in Season One in order to help Kim — and, ultimately, to return the money where it belongs).

If Chuck adheres to the letter of the law (aggrandizing himself at the expense of sometimes violating the spirit of what is right), Jimmy at least a good deal of the time tries to follow the spirit of what is right (aggrandizing himself at the expense of the letter of the law).

Of course, there is the additional layer that much of Jimmy’s scheming is also self-serving, not only benefiting him financially or reputationally but making up for his own inadequacies and insecurities. The show and its various flashbacks makes it clear that he always felt that he lived in Chuck’s shadow; he was the screw up con man while his brother was the respected lawyer and legal scholar (who was admired even by a young Kim in a flashback where Jimmy seems to start to gravitate toward studying law on his own in order to win the respect of both Chuck and Kim).

Additionally, Jimmy is responding to his disappointment over his father. His father was honest to a fault, a born “mark.” Throughout childhood, he watched his father get scammed by con men, and he developed an Oedipal resentment toward this “sucker” who eventually lost the business due to his consistent naive trust in others. In one memorable instance, a scammer who just conned the father tells a young Jimmy that there are two kinds of people, sheep and wolves. Jimmy obviously silently vows to become a wolf and sets about building a self image in complete contradiction to the “sucker” who raised him.

Also, at the end of the day, Jimmy finds his schemes fun. As one character puts it late in the show, he “gets off on it.” Jimmy never properly fits into society the way he’s “supposed” to. He can’t resist breaking rules, taking shortcuts, and generally violating prohibitions. Every time he comes to a switch marked “do not touch,” he can’t help but flip it. He tried for a while to follow a straight and narrow path, living up to an image that he thought would win him the respect of Chuck, and ultimately Kim. He had a job at Davis and Main: he could have worked this prestigious, six-figure job, collected his millions when the Sandpiper settlement came in, married Kim, and enjoyed a quiet life. Even late in the series, he is given an opportunity to join HHM, which is what he once (thought, or claimed he) wanted.

But a “normal” life isn’t exciting enough for Jimmy. He can’t stand having a routine where he goes into an office and punches a clock and goes home to simple pleasures. He needs to be scheming and tricking people, for all the reasons discussed above.

Ironically, it is Chuck’s low opinion of his brother, and consequent poor treatment of him, that further pushes Jimmy into embracing his worst impulses. We see how Chuck had the opportunity to guide Jimmy once he passed the bar: Chuck could have recommended hiring him at HHM and taken him under his wing to mentor him properly. Instead, Chuck insists the firm not hire Jimmy and cowardly hides his betrayal of his brother, making his partner Howard pretend to be the one who doesn’t want him. This action of Chuck’s is itself a kind of scam that is not a million miles from a “Slippin Jimmy” scheme. One wonders where Jimmy would have ended up had Chuck only believed in him and been willing to help him out.

But Chuck doesn’t, both because of resentment and petty jealousy. Chuck detests the fact that Jimmy was his parents’ favorite and also that he stole enough money from the family store as a boy to lead to the failure of the business (which is Chuck’s belief, at least: Jimmy holds that his father’s naivety is the primary cause). He even recalls that their mother’s last words were calling out for Jimmy, which Chuck witnessed and callously refused to tell his brother. It’s not just their parents: everyone seems to like Jimmy better than Chuck, even though Chuck is the “better” of the two from a legal and moral standpoint. This point can be seen in Jimmy’s friendly banter with everyone in the mailroom, and the way that he is so earnestly liked by people like Ernie, but it emerges most clearly in the episode “Rebecca,” where Chuck’s wife clearly takes an immediately liking to Jimmy but doesn’t even laugh at Chuck’s insecure attempt at a joke at the end of the evening.

After getting Jimmy out of legal trouble following his “Chicago sunroof” disaster (a truly Joycean Fall for Slippin’ Jimmy), Chuck had gotten to a place where he was fine with Jimmy as long as the latter knew his place: as a down-on-his-luck schmo to whom Chuck could always feel superior. As long as Jimmy was down in the mail room and working off his karma as a reformed criminal, Chuck could tolerate him. The problem starts when Jimmy takes correspondence classes and works his tail off to become a lawyer, someone who might see himself (or worse, who might appear to others) as an equal to Chuck. It seems that Chuck’s mental illness — his belief that he is suffering from an allergy to electricity — began when Jimmy becomes a lawyer, and we watch during the show how his condition worsens when Jimmy backslides into his con man ways but improves when Chuck interferes with Jimmy’s career.

In caring for his brother, Jimmy makes the ethically dubious choice to enable his mental illness by single-handedly bringing him everything he needs every day so that he does not have to leave the house. By doing this, Jimmy gets to claim he’s being a “good brother,” and gets to feel better than his brother (“You’d do the same for me,” he tells Chuck in a late flashback — when both men know full well that this is a lie; Jimmy can feel superior and inflict guilt on his brother). But best of all, he gets his brother in a vulnerable position where Jimmy now has power over him.

The relationship between these characters is complex. They both are proud and carry a resentment of the other, but they are bound by both blood and a need to feed their ego in relating to the other.

*

The energies of the “Brother Battle” course through Finnegans Wake in ways that recall the conflict between Chuck and Jimmy. Chapter I.7, a long denunciation of Shem by a Shaunish narrator, feels in part like it could be one of Chuck’s condemnations of Jimmy (sadly, the word “chicanery” does not appear in the Wake).

The diatribe begins in I.6, a chapter in which a Shemish character is quizzing a Shaunish character, so most of the chapter consists of Shaun’s answers. Remember, Finnegans Wake is a dream: characters pop up in different forms, transform into other characters, and no logical consistency is needed on the level of what’s “happening.” Late in I.6, Shaun suddenly turns into a professor and begins giving a lecture on space and time that turns out, on close inspection, to really be about the Brother Battle (Space representing Shaun and Time representing Shem).

The professor tells the story of the Mookse and the Gripes — a dream version of the fable the Fox and the Grapes — to illustrate why Space/Shaun stands for a superior perspective. The story involves the two characters getting into a stalemate argument while their sister (a symbol of the female principle of the universe) tries in vain to get their attention (when she fails: “I see, she sighed. There are menner”). The brothers stay locked in their argument and are eventually transformed into a rock and a tree, Shaun and Shem becoming Stone and Stem.

And there were left now an only elmtree and but a stone. Polled with pietrous, Sierre but saule. 

This brief excerpt shows the complexity of Finnegans Wake, how dense it is with references and puns. The last sentence juxtaposes the names Paul and Peter. Paul (who was originally named Saul) was a convert to Christianity who spread the religion far and wide and wrote many letters that found their way into the New Testament. Peter was the follower Christ called the rock upon which he would build his church. Tree (branch, pen, letter-writing) and rock. “Polled” refers to a tree that has had its upper branches removed. “Pietrous” comes from the Italian word for rock. “Sierre” sounds like “sere,” an archaic term for withered (as a tree becomes). “Saule” is French for a polled willow tree. “Sierre” also looks like “pierre” (French for “rock”). The phrases put the brothers side by side, even as they overlap in the word “sierre” (withered like a tree, but stony like “pierre”).

After telling the fable, the professor continues to lecture about the brothers in the guise of two conspirators against Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. As sons of Humphrey Earwicker, they overthrew him and replaced him. Here, their names are mixed with dairy products: Burrus (butter), the professor says, is superior to Caseous (cheese):

Burrus, let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace, the mildest of milkstoffs yet unbeaten as a risicide and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous whereat Caseous is obversely the revise of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals, though the betterman of the two is meltingly addicted to the more casual side of the arrivaliste case and, let me say it at once, as zealous over him as is passably he. 

Burrus corresponds to the self-righteous, narcissistic Chuck: the “real choice” who is “unadulterous” (unadulterated and pure, but also morally upright so as not to commit sins like adultery). Caseous is a Shem/Jimmy type, the “revise” of his brother — both the reverse and a revised version, though clearly not improved: “not an ideal choose by any meals” (not an ideal choice by any means). Yet Shaun is overzealous and “zealous over him.” It’s a cute coincidence that the Shaun figure is called the betterman — a step above being a (Saul) Goodman.

The speaker of this passage is a Shaun figure, so of course he thinks Burrus is the better of the two. He says that Caseous can always find the flaws with others, especially Ireland:

It was aptly and corrigidly stated […] that his seeingscraft was that clarety as were the wholeborough of Poutresbourg to be averlaunched over him pitchbatch he could still make out with his augstritch the green moat in Ireland’s Eye.

Like Joyce, Shem is half blind and always looking for faults in Ireland. So his “seeingscraft” had the kind of clarity (“clarety”) such that even if he were completely in the dark, he’d still able to see his country’s flaws. Joyce is playing with the line in the Bible that warns not to criticize someone for having a mote of wood in his eye when you have a beam in your own. In other words, don’t be a hypocrite. The Shaun narrator is accusing Shem here of being such a hypocrite. In many ways, this accords with the Jimmy we see in Better Call Saul, but of course Chuck/Shaun is no better in this regard.

We see Shaun’s hypocrisy in I.7, expressed with a play on the same Biblical expression. There, the Shaunish narrator reports how Shem was denied the ability to publish his works (much as Joyce encountered difficulty publishing Dubliners at the start of his career), so he made his own ink out of his “wit’s end.” The passage goes on to suggest that Shem performed a…Chicago sunroof…in a bucket and mixed all of his waste together into ink, writing all over his body with his own filth. This disgusting image is a symbol for how Joyce’s art is in touch with the earthy materiality of the physical world. But the Shaunish narrator veils these events by recounting them in Latin. Just before this Latin passage, he says,

Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed porporates that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek.

It’s another version of the mote and beam. This says, basically, let this account be written in the language of the Catholic Church so that an Anglican priest [a Shaun figure], who is unable to read it, will only see the scarlet mark on the brow of Babylon (and thus condemn Shem and the Catholics) but not feel his own similar mark.

This is Chuck. He sees Jimmy’s flaws as clear as day but he will not face his own.

At the end of I.7, Shaun assumes the form of someone called Justius, a manifestation of the Law itself, and he condemns Shem for several pages. After urging Shem to confess his sins, he begins, “Let us pry.” He moralistically presents himself as a holy figure, but he wants to search out all of Shem’s flaws to prove that he’s better than him.

Listen to him start:

You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island on the piejaw of hilarious heaven […] and now, forsooth, […] you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul. […] I shall shiver for my purity while they will weepbig for your sins.

He accuses Shem of failing to live up to the wishes of his parents and spending his time pursuing women:

you thwarted the wious pish of your cogodparents, soph, among countless occasions of failing (for, said you, I will elenchate), adding to the malice of your transgression […] all that too with cantreds of countless catchaleens […] accomplished women, indeed fully educanded, far from being old and rich behind their dream of arrivisme

He accuses Shem of riding his coattails in a line that oddly anticipates the end of Season 3, Episode 10:

you set fire to my tailcoat when I hold the paraffin smoker under yours (I hope that chimney’s clear) but, slackly shirking both your bullet and your billet, you beat it backwards like Boulanger from Galway (but he combed the grass against his stride) to sing us a song of alibi,

He calls his brother a “semisemitic serendipitist,” which amuses me in the context of Jimmy assuming the Jewish-sounding name “Goodman” and hilariously accusing the country club of antisemitism in Season 6, Episode 1.

Of course, Shaun has to praise himself (in the third person) and play the victim:

There grew up beside you […] that other, Immaculatus, from head to foot, sir, that pure one, Altrues of other times, he who was well known to celestine circles before he sped aloft, our handsome young spiritual physician that was to be, seducing every sense to selfwilling celebesty, the most winning counterfeuille on our incomeshare lotetree, a chum of the angelets

His “celebesty” is his celebrity (as in Chuck’s reputation as a brilliant legal mind) and celibacy, his own sense of his moral pureness (and, in Chuck’s case, his solitude after his divorce).

He accuses Shem of having killed his brother, as Cain slew Abel.

but him you laid low with one hand one fine May morning in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe, because he mussed your speller on you or because he cut a pretty figure in the focus of your frontispecs (not one did you slay, no, but a continent!) to find out how his innards worked!

He accuses the brother of being jealous and resentful when he himself is equally the envious, resentful one. The speech ends with him calling Shem “mad,” in the sense of insane, but it is really Shaun who is angry. He cannot see the beam in his own eye.

And, just as Chuck calls Jimmy with a law degree a “chimp with a machine gun” — indiscriminately harming others — who is wasting his energy making a display of feeling bad for his actions, Shaun calls his brother a “simian” who cries false tears:

The simian has no sentiment secretions but weep cataracts for all me, Pain the Shamman! 

Compare this to Chuck’s final speech to Jimmy, when he tells him that there is no point to Jimmy feeling regret or putting on a “show of remorse” because “You’re just gonna keep hurting people.”

Jimmy, this is what you do. You hurt people, over and over and over. And then there’s this show of remorse. […] I know you don’t think it’s a show. I don’t doubt your emotions are real. But what’s the point of all the sad faces and the gnashing of teeth? If you’re not going to change your behavior, and you won’t […] Why don’t you skip the whole exercise? In the end, you’re going to hurt everyone around you. You can’t help it. So stop apologizing and accept it. Embrace it. Frankly, I’d have more respect for you if you did.

These words — which nicely encapsulate what the “Saul Goodman” persona becomes — come at a particularly bad moment. Jimmy arrives at Chuck’s house to make up with his brother and tell him he has regrets, but Chuck turns his back, refusing to open up emotionally and have a heart to heart.

From Chuck’s perspective (which resembles Shaun’s), his brother is a version of Cain, harming an innocent, even immaculate sibling. And indeed, Jimmy does inadvertently and indirectly drive Chuck to suicide after taking away his ability to practice law. But the brothers are uncomfortably similar, and from Jimmy’s perspective, one could argue that Chuck is the one who slayed James McGill and replaced him with the shallow character of Saul Goodman that he would play for years (obviously, it’s the trauma of losing Kim that prompts him to assume the character of Goodman fully, but Chuck with this speech laid the groundwork and deepened Jimmy’s emotional withdrawal that gradually led him to his destiny).

Which one is Cain and which one is Abel? They each take a turn to play both roles.

The theme of regret, which is so vital to this scene, emerges again in the finale, which finds Jimmy — across the timeline of both shows — using the thought experiment of a time machine to ask Mike and Walter about their regrets. Jimmy is only able to give joke answers, but at the end of the episode, a flashback to just before the series began shows Jimmy bringing his brother a copy of The Time Machine. The implication is that Jimmy’s regret is not working on his relationship with his brother, a regret that both of the McGill boys probably have. That final interaction in the finale gives us tastes of their dysfunction, including Jimmy’s “you’d do the same for me” and his assumption that Chuck just wants to talk down to him. If the two had had a real heart-to-heart conversation at any point in the series, if both of them could have set aside their pride and resentment to be truly vulnerable to the other, everything might have turned out differently. Chuck might be alive, and Jimmy might be practicing law alongside him, their different talents complementing each other’s, as they do at the very start of the Sandpiper case.

We see the beginning of Jimmy’s healing when he confesses in the final episode what he did to Chuck. He even calls what he did to Chuck a “crime” to a bewildered Bill Oakley, who has no idea why someone would confess that in a legal context. Jimmy finally allows himself to feel fully the regret signified by that episode’s flashbacks. He essentially enacts the process depicted in the Wake as the brothers reconciling. He’s at the beginning of his own internal transformation.

*

Another thought occurs to me about the role of the female principle of the universe, who exists in the Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, and in Better Call Saul as Kim.

In the Wake, ALP is the female aspect of the dreamer’s psyche, what Carl Jung called the “Anima.” As a character in the novel, she is responsible for both her husband’s Fall and his Redemption. It’s not clear exactly what “happens,” since it’s a dream, but there are many tales told that weave throughout the book, and in one telling, ALP sends two young girls (aspects of herself, as Shaun and Shem are aspects of her husband) to tempt Earwicker into some kind of offense. Rumors about this misdeed spread far and wide, destroying his reputation. He suffers a “fall” that becomes, in the dream logic, akin to the legendary Tim Finnegan falling off a ladder in the vaudeville song from which the novel gets its title. He shatters into pieces like Humpty Dumpty. But it is ALP who also puts things right, squashing the scandal and gathering up the pieces of the Fall and distributing them into the next generation so that the children will be prepared to act out the pattern of fall and redemption again. In helping the children assume again the role of HCE, she “resurrects” him (just as Tim Finnegan rises from the dead, and just as the dreamer will wake up whole in the morning).

In Better Call Saul, Kim helps lead Jimmy to his Fall by insisting that they carry out the plan to ruin Howard. Her playful “finger guns” at the end of Season 5 foreshadow the way this plan will shoot down Jimmy. When Jimmy tries to call off the scheme in Season 6, Episode 6, her dramatic U-turn anticipates how their relationship will reverse.

To be sure, Jimmy bears a lot of culpability for what happens as well. I’m not saying that everything is entirely Kim’s fault, far from it. In fact, it’s arguable how much “fault” there is, since there was no way for either of them to predict that their scheme would result in someone’s death. But a tragedy of that sort — something like it — was bound to happen eventually, as Kim and Jimmy bring out the worst in each other, plotting elaborate scams as a substitute for real emotional connection. Even if Howard had lived, their schemes would have kept getting more and more destructive until a different kind of calamity occurred. We’re given just enough of Kim’s backstory to see the sort of sense her character makes: raised by a con-artist mother, she associates scams with love and also resents being forced to assume the role of the “responsible” one early in life. She has the perfect background to be attracted to Jimmy and use their relationship to throw off the shackles of the mature persona she’s cultivated her whole life. [The unconscious energies are a mirror: Kim wants to get closer to her mother figure; Jimmy wants to distance himself from his father figure]

But my point is mostly that Kim serves a similar narrative function as ALP, precipitating the lead character’s fall as well as bringing about his Redemption/Resurrection. In the Wake, ALP writes a Letter, a mysterious document that both condemns and exonerates her husband. It’s a symbol for all literature and art, which endlessly engages with our shared Humanity, our Here Comes Everybody: literature and art reveal humanity’s flaws but also help us accept that those flaws are inevitable, and ultimately make life what it is. It’s been argued that Finnegans Wake is a meditation on “felix culpa,” the Fortunate Fall: the idea that our misdeeds are actually kind of a good thing because they necessitate the greater good of forgiveness and redemption.

Kim’s confession — her affidavit — is this show’s version of the Letter. When Jimmy learns that it exists, that Kim has unburdened herself by making a full confession, he realizes that he can do the same. Her bravery helps him to act, to confess publicly to everything — including the “not crime” of destroying his brother — and reclaim his true name and identity. When Jimmy echoes back the “finger guns” in the final scene of the show, he’s taking what was once a sign of their mutual destruction and transforming it into a sign of their shared redemption. Just like the Letter, which both destroys and clears the way for rebirth, the finger guns shoot down both Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman, as well as both personas Kim inhabits.

*

In Finnegans Wake, ALP and her younger incarnation intercede between the brothers, the aspects of HCE. The professor of I.6 puts it this way:

Positing, as above, too males pooles, the one the pictor of the other and the omber the Skotia of the one, and looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males we feel we must waistfully woent a female to focus and on this stage there pleasantly appears the cowrymaid M. […] Margareena she’s very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! she velly fond of chee.

Remember, this is the professor, who is pompous and, as we can see, sexist. He wants a female to focus in the middle of the two brothers (with the word “woe” embedded in “want” to produce “woent,” implying that she will create sorrow, like the legends of Eve or Pandora). In between butter and cheese is margarine. She’s fond of butter/Chuck, but…alas, says the butter, she’s very fond of cheese/Jimmy.

One scene of Better Call Saul that makes me think of Kim in the “undistributed middle between males” is the end of Season 4, Episode 3, where Jimmy reads aloud Chuck’s letter after his death. This scene is one of my favorite performances on the show: he reads the letter in a flat, bored voice, dismissing it as more insincerity from his brother (reasonably, given their last interaction). Confronted by both McGill brothers’ resentment for each other, mixed with their genuine affection, Kim reacts with some of the emotion that Jimmy is suppressing, as well as the emotion that Chuck could never bring himself to express in life or in this letter. In this moment, she really does mediate between the two brothers by feeling and giving expression to what they cannot: worry over Jimmy (who is obviously repressing his grief), guilt over what they did to Chuck, regret over how the siblings’ relationship turned out. Those feelings and more come tumbling out of Kim. At the end of that season, Jimmy wins his reinstatement by discarding the dead words of the letter and embodying, just for a moment, some of the emotions that Kim feels in this scene.

This is part of how Jimmy manages his painful emotions, feeling them only when he can tell himself it’s part of a scam and then quickly repressing them again afterward. Moments like the reinstatement hearing provide a glimpse of what Jimmy could be at his best, if he embraced those feelings, let himself be vulnerable, and overcame his pride.

In the Wake, it’s ALP (in the form of her two aspects) who comes down to the riverbank to carry away the stem and stone that the boys have become. It’s ALP who is seen by the boys as the “whome of your eternal geomater,” the force who binds them together as the “living spit of dead waters.” It’s ALP who bursts out of the mouth of Shem at the very end of I.7, acting as the muse who encourages him to become an artist and “lift the lifewand” that is his pen.

Like Shem, Jimmy McGill is an artist. His cons, the characters he plays, the stories he invents — they are his artistry. Art can sometimes serve pride and sometimes serve the goal of human connection and positive transformation. Just before his confession in the finale, Jimmy announces, “It’s showtime.” The final performance of Saul Goodman is to destroy Saul Goodman and to birth Jimmy McGill anew.

One of the things Finnegans Wake teaches us is that we are all more artists than we know. We are all involved in telling stories to ourselves and each other, constructing images of ourselves. In doing so, all of us suffer Falls (into pride and selfishness), participating in conflicts that re-enact parts of the Brother Battle in our own lives. But all of us are also capable of changing the stories we tell ourselves and others, making it possible for us to overcome our self-centeredness and transmute our experience into something better, for everyone in our lives.

Like the Wake, Better Call Saul is a love letter to the power of words. With words alone, Jimmy can talk down a death sentence to a lesser punishment; he can talk a woman into loving him; he can talk a chemistry teacher into becoming a greater drug kingpin than he ever imagined; he can talk himself into a light and easy sentence; and he can talk himself into throwing away that easy sentence so that he can come to terms with everything he’s been running from.

Few of us will face the extraordinary and dangerous situations that Jimmy gets himself into, but all of us will face our pride, our uncomfortable emotions, our difficult relationships, and our awareness of ways we’ve let down ourselves and others. Art like Finnegans Wake and Better Call Saul can help us reflect on these themes in our own lives and, with luck, act to transform ourselves.

And yeah, some parts of the show are like a comic book and are a little goofy. What are you gonna do? The realistic parts of Better Call Saul, with its all-too-human drama, more than makes up for it.