How can one identify the dreamer within a text that is describing a space that, by definition, resists conscious thought's attempts to describe it? One possible answer to this question is offered by John Bishop, who, in Joyce's Book of the Dark: "Finnegans Wake," argues that Joyce's novel is "a reconstruction of the night–and a single night–as experienced by 'one stable somebody' whose 'earwitness' on the world is coherently chronological." In other words, the text itself is a narrative of a sleeping body, situated in a particular place at a particular time. Because, Bishop argues, the dreamer's body is asleep and therefore "dead to the world" like a tomb or coffin or ship, the exterior space which surrounds HCE is entirely separate from the conscious world of Earwicker's waking thoughts; consequently, the body itself is localized in its own textual universe. This sleeping body, however, is always exterior to and separate from the text itself, just as a sleeping, unconscious body is separated from its immediate surroundings. The body's control over the narrative, however, is significant and is determined largely by the intermittent influence of sound from the exterior world to the dreaming body's ears. As Joyce notes in a letter to William Bird, "in sleep our senses are dormant, except the sense of hearing, which is always awake, since you can't close your ears. So any sound that comes to our ears is turned into a dream." While this is a rather reductive interpretation of the sleeping process, it does set up a way of reading the dreamer's ears as a doorway between the novel's figures (HCE in particular) and the world outside the novel.

Haunted Ink