An Intertextual Analysis of Sleep and Wake in The Thousand and One Nights and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Abstract Through studying classical literature and cultures of various counties, especially Persia, James Joyce has created his everlasting novel, Finnegans Wake, whose narratives can never come to an end. He creates a kind of fascinating intertextuality between these two works by using quotations without any quotation marks and by interconnecting the Persian stories of The Thousand and One Nights with English stories and culture which involve the readers into a new verbal play of signifiers. This paper, by using the theories of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva and applying their theory of intertextuality, searches for the footsteps of The Thousand and One Nights in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Meanwhile, the paper shows that how the occurrence of events in Joyce’s novel follows the patterns of Shahrzad’s sleep and wake to lead Joyce’s characters away from their sleep or ignorance and moving toward wake or knowledge. Joyce designs a labyrinth for his readers, in his narration, which lasts many nights, even more than thousand and one nights, to enjoy and evaluate the patterns of sleep and wake. As a result of gaining the horizon of this new knowledge, his readers learn to interact and communicate with other cultures.