THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF NEOLOGISM AND STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Contemporary Journal of Social Science Review July 2, 2025 Wania Gul, Babar Riaz
In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce uses made-up words and stream-of-consciousness narration to create a dreamlike linguistic atmosphere that imitates and subverts unconscious mental processes and conventional culture. The novel's neologisms—formed through compounding, portmanteaux, and onomatopoeia—function as expressions of dream logic and psychological richness, while the stream-of-consciousness narrative blurs linearity and fixed identity, presenting consciousness as fragmented, recursive, and mythic. Joyce also reworks motifs of the Irish Literary Revival, deconstructing conventional senses of national identity through radical style. The analysis shows that Joyce's language is not merely a medium but the very content of meaning, redefining narrative as an enactment of cultural memory and unconscious association.