A skeleton key to Finnegans wake,

That countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake have given up after a few pages and dismissed Joyce's great work as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible" is no more surprising than it is disheartening. One needs a "key" to enter the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake - and this key is exactly what Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson here provide. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of the book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the reader can venture out on his own.