Every telling has a taling, and that’s the he and the she of it

Finnegans Wake, I.8

In many ways, Finnegans Wake is a book about storytelling. It’s a collection of stories. In some places, full stories are told from beginning to end; in other places, they abruptly start and stop, get interrupted, meld into other tales, or get lost in confusion (like the history of HCE in I.2-4).