What’s in a name?

The phrase “The Suspended Sentence” is one of the items in a catalogue at the beginning of chapter I.5, offering names under which ALP’s Letter has been known. Since the Letter is a stand-in for Finnegans Wake itself, this list could be considered a series of alternate titles for the book.

Like most things in Finnegans Wake, these titles have multiple meanings. “The Suspended Sentence” refers primarily to a lenient punishment for whatever crime HCE committed. Or, since he is acquitted in one telling of his story (though convicted in the court of public opinion), the title could signify that people ought to suspend their harsh judgment of him. Perhaps an implication is that fallible humanity as a whole — all of us, who are similarly ever falling into transgression (because Here Comes Everybody) — should be treated mercifully.

The title also, however, suggests the final/initial (grammatical) sentence of the book, which is suspended between the last and first page, as the novel famously ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of (presumably) the same one. Perhaps more broadly, it could signify how consciousness itself — which can be likened to a long, babbling sentence (as in the final chapter of Ulysses) — is seemingly “suspended” in nothing at all, arising into our experience and passing away swiftly like a running river.