"Acomedy of letters!"

(425.4-427.9)  As the first chapter of Book III of the Wake winds toward its imminent (and eminent) conclusion, the crowd asks its final question of Shaun.  It's actually more of an assertion than a question, really:  Seeing that he's "so strikingly brainy and well letterread," the crowd tells "ingenious" Shaun that they fancy he "could use worse of yourself" and best Shem's letter, if only Shaun would take the time and trouble to do so.

"Undoubtedly, but that is show," Shaun answers.  He's liable to do just that any time he likes, and if he would, he'd "far exceed what that bogus bolshy of a shame, my soamheis brother, Gaoy Fecks, is conversant with in audible black and prink."  It's all in his "mine's I," he says, but "I would never for anything take so much trouble of such doing."  Why wouldn't he take the trouble, though?  "Because I am altogether a chap too fly and hairyman for to infradig the like of that ultravirulence."  So, Shaun says that he has the capacity for writing a great work of literature, but to do so would be beneath him.  What's more, he's taken offense to the damage to his mother's reputation, and he swears that "I will commission to the flames any incendiarist whosoever or ahriman howsoclever who would endeavour to set ever annyma roner moother of mine on fire."

This defense of his mother gets the large and brawny Shaun all worked up, and he begins to weep.  After all, the narrator explains, he "had harvey loads of feeling in him" and was "as innocent and undesignful as the freshfallen calef."  He's concerned about keeping up appearances, though, so he quickly "dished allarmes away and laughed it off with a wipe at his pudgies and gulp apologetic, healing his tare be the smeyle of his oye, oogling around."  Exhausted, Shaun is no longer in the mood to talk, and he instead looks up at the stars.  While gazing upward, he grows unsteady, "lusosing the harmonical balance of his ballbearing extremeties," and falls over "like a flask of lightning."  He then rolled backward down the valley until "he spoorlessly disappaled and vanesshed, like a popo down a papa, from circular circulatio."  With this, the narrator announces, like an auctioneer, that Shaun was "Gaogaogaone!"