Finnegans Wake is the last book written by the Irish writer James Joyce . By 1938 virtually all of Finnegans Book was in print in the transition serialisation and in the booklets , with the exception of Book IV . However , Joyce continued to revise all previously published sections until Finnegans Wakes final published form , resulting in the text existing in a number of different forms , to the point that critics can speak of Finnegans Wake being a different entity to Work in Progress .