A real student of this novel will experience the novel as a complicated argument with its author. Why not use language? Because by using an invented pidgin, there is a twofold game: one is rite of entry, because a reader may not participate until they have learned the tongue, like Latin and the Catholic mass; the second is that by struggling to understand the language, the reader finds themselves in a role very similar to the position they hold in real life. We are always assaulted by a reality that is too overwhelming and complicated to understand, and although there are fragments of information that seem to make sense, the participant must strive to understand, ultimately finding their understanding in a kind of religious surrender.
This is a Taoist interpretation of the text, because it places the reader on the center line between order and chaos. It isn't exactly gibberish that Joyce uses in his prose; rather, it is faux-English with a Gaelic spin. If one adopts the Irish accent (or at least attempts it with a lilt), they are already more qualified to perform the text in a way that can clue the brain into the meaning of the words. That means that it is not exactly chaos; it is meaningful language shrouded by one degree of chaos. The role of the reader is the role of the child who struggles to make sense of language because they are still learning it.
The children in this novel are the carriers of dreams and horrors. For the two girls who were allegedly molested in the park, their understanding of the quiet peaceful park was suddenly interrupted by an experience of human nature that was to them perfectly perplexing and divine. Because ALP seeks to defend her husband, we see that she is like Hecate who allows Kore to be stolen by Hades of the underworld. Another place the reader finds archetypal themes is in ALP's relationship to Issy, which portrays human life in the dynamic of a mother-daughter.
Finally, there is the obvious Christian imagery to consider. There is a (quite funny) scene where the title character, Finnegan has died and is being offered by his poor wife as the main course at his own wake. This is a symbol of the sacrament, as we know from his subsequent resurrection from the dead. Someone spills whiskey on him, and in true Irish fashion (this is Joyce's joke) he wakes up for one last night-cap. Instead the church attendants talk him into dying. He doesn't want to die; he wants to live, even for all the pain and horror of their life of poverty. In addition to this religious motif, we have Adam and Eve, in cahoots about a seizure of forbidden fruit; HCE has allegedly assaulted a few underaged girls in a garden park. Their sons compete to overthrow the father and steal the love of the mother, an Oedipal twist on Cain and Abel.
When the mother finishes the novel with her final words, she ends the novel midsentence, showing herself to be the Great Mother (a Jungian name for this archetype) whose prose (because the sentence finishes the first line of the book, forming a circuit) encompasses the text completely, making her into both Eve and the living "corpus" of the text. She is a metaphor for reality itself, or rather for the non-being, eternal aspect of the human soul. This is akin to the Taoist verse which says, "I drink from the Great Mother's breast." Because of all these factors, the book is best understood as a brilliant portrayal of what Carl Jung calls "The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious."
