What I have been saying about the relation between Joyce's texts and the texts that surround them holds true for the different parts of Joyce's oeuvre as well. The reader returning to a work of Joyce's after having read, or reread, another one finds it a different work (or, to put it another way, finds that he or she has become a different reader). All Joyce's productions are interconnected: not just the way the early texts prefigure the later texts, but the way the later texts rewrite the early texts, and in so doing proffer readings of those texts that would not otherwise emerge--and that Joyce himself, when he wrote those early texts, may not have been in a position to appreciate. To take one example: the beginning of Ulysses both continues and retroactively transforms the ending of A Portrait, exposing Stephen Dedalus's heroic ambitions as an artist at the close of the earlier text to the possible accusation of self-deceived posturing when we learn in the later text of their unimpressive outcome.
Something similar happens within the covers of Joyce's books, too: "The Dead" can be regarded as a reading of all the stories of Dubliners that come before it, and thus offers the reader a fresh perspective on them; the later chapters of Ulysses reread and thereby remake the earlier chapters. And even the boundaries between works become porous; in some ways the first three chapters of Ulysses belong more with A Portrait than they do with the last three chapters of Ulysses--which in turn might be said to be a prelude to Finnegans Wake. To begin a work of Joyce's at the beginning and to read to the end is therefore to exercise only one of many options. New readers of Ulysses may find their first reading less arduous if they begin at chapter four (the opening of the second part of the book), then move from the end of chapter six to chapters one to three before proceeding to chapter seven. There will be some losses in doing this, but some gains as well; and we need not fear that the irate ghost of Joyce will come to haunt us with an insistence on linear integrity, since his texts themselves undo such a notion.
