The wake
The first critical symbol of the novel is arguably the title symbol, Finnegans Wake, a title which should have an apostrophe but doesn't. At the wake of Finnegan, the corpse is offered as the meal at the wake, but before anyone can take a bite, the body disappears. Then, as if it had not disappeared at all, someone drops whiskey on the body and it comes to life, eager for one last taste of alcohol (an example of Joyce's hilarious wit). These two symbols can be understood as references to the Catholic mass, because the body that is eaten in Holy Communion "has disappeared in one sense," and because the body and alcohol are being offered at a funeral service, which is one place where Communion is commonly offered.
HCE's sin
The central plot of the novel is that HCE, the Earwicker family father, has allegedly committed an indiscretion with two young ladies in a park. This is a sin of the "forbidden fruit" variety, done in a park, by a patriarch. The wife sets about defending him with letters (language and argument). These symbols combine to form a retelling of the Fall of Man sequence from Genesis 3. The father's sin symbolizes a fall into chaos which can be seen as a mythic representation for the chaotic language itself. Also, the wife defending him is akin to Eve blaming the serpent. Also, "Eve and Adam" are explicitly mentioned in the first sentence fragment of the epic novel.
The symbolic language
The trickery of language is a thematic motif in the novel. Right away, a person reading this book expecting an English-language novel will be fairly concerned to discover that the prose verges on absolute gibberish. Yet, it isn't gibberish. It is decipherable chaos. This makes the reader fight to understand, searching for meaning. That symbolizes the way people struggle to find meaning in the chaos of life. The gift of Joyce's novel is that there is meaning to be found in its deeply archetypal plot.
The unconscious
Jung and Campbell were very aware of this symbolic interpretation. This interpretation stems from the idea that the plot of the book (and its confusing use of meta-language) can be seen as an artistic attempt to replicate the human dream state. In that case, the book would be a portrait of the unconscious (the part of the mind that is not clearly seen in the light of waking conscious). Notice that there is a significant exploration of dark-sides within characters: HCE molests girls in a park, the brother's compete to do off with him and become the love of their mother, the mother turns a blind eye to evil (one could argue), and many of the characters have serious drinking habits. And yet, the characters are vibrant and nearly godlike. Indeed, HCE stands for "Here Comes Everybody."
The Mother archetype
The most critical of these unconscious symbols is the complicated use of the Earwicker mother as a symbol. The novel begins midsentence without context, much like a human birth starts consciousness in medias res, leaving a child to acquire language (as the reader here must do) to make sense of a complicated field of overwhelming data. This makes the novel like a mother to the reader. Also, the final passage of the novel shows the mother turning into a river and running into the sea (a common symbol in mythology for the Great Mother, as in Hindu folklore). When the final sentence fragment ends the novel, that symbolizes the cycle of rebirth, because the reader sees that the novel reincarnates itself; the end is also the beginning. This is common symbolism in the field of comparative mythology.
