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Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable

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THREE NOVELS BY SAMUEL BECKETT: MOLLOY MALONE DIES THE UNNAMABLE. By Samuel Beckett. 414 pages. New York: Grove Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8021-5091-8 (pbk).

There are many good reasons for reading Beckett's Trilogy. There is, in the first place, his beautifully clear and supple prose, a prose that moves with ease from the simple and straightforward treatment of everyday matters through to passages of intense lyrical beauty, or to equally moving outbursts of extreme brutality and obscenity. There is also Beckett's wonderful sense of humor, and readers will often find themselves chuckling at his eccentric characters and their zany carryings on. There is the unique effect produced by the general strangeness of his novels, with their odd characters moving through vividly realized landscapes which seem real enough but in which many of the happenings are either inexplicable or left unexplained.

There are also such things as his compassionate treatment of animals, for although Beckett seems most of the time to have little love for his fellow men, the intensity of his love and respect for the humbler creatures of the earth - donkeys, sheep, pigs, bees, birds, etc., - can be overpowering. Here, for example, is Beckett in 'Malone Dies' (p.304) describing, in his powerful and beautiful prose, a grey hen : ". . . this big, anxious, ashen bird, poised irresolute on the bright threshold, then clucking and clawing behind the range and fidgeting her atrophied wings, soon to be sent flying with a broom and angry cries and soon to return, cautiously, with little hesitant steps, stopping often to listen, opening and shutting her little bright black eyes"

There is here a total identification with a creature we would normally have difficulty identifying with, and a very real compassion. Like Molloy,Moran, and Malone, the hen is trapped: trapped in the universe - and trapped in a body. Like them, too, it desires happiness and is averse to suffering. It is experiencing the agony of incarnation, the agony of being in a body. It suffers from heat, cold, thirst, hunger, fear, desire, confusion, frustration, loss, pain, injury, terror, and ultimately death. It also endures many of the other afflictions that we too must somehow suffer through and try to survive - all the while uncertain as to how we got here, why we are here, and where we are going, and desperately searching for some meaning, some explanation, some way out.

Beckett is not easy to read. His books demand real stamina. They give us a world in which, despite its occasional hilarity, none of us can feel truly comfortable for nothing in it makes much sense. For Beckett, as for the Buddhists, a continuous self is a mere illusion and has no real existence - hence the indeterminacy of his characters, and the melting of Molloy into Moran, Malone into Macmann, etc. Ultimately unreal, and thus without meaning, they move painfully, but also comically, through a world in which the link between cause and effect has been broken - a world which is itself therefore meaningless, and in which redemption can come only through art since in a world emptied of absolute meanings there can only be fictions. While each of us is unconsciously busy creating the fiction which is our self, and helping to sustain the larger fiction which is society, Beckett was consciously creating his own fictions. But they are all fictions and all ultimately without meaning. Or perhaps one could say that the meaning is that there is no meaning.

Despite this general meaningless, however, readers who patiently work through these books will find much to reward them. They offer us a true, though grotesquely exaggerated, vision of life, albeit one in which there is much that is grim and disgusting. They also offer a marvelous field for the play of Beckett's comic genius, and he can rarely resist poking fun at the kind of mind produced by the massive organized pedantry which passes for education in the modern world. And finally, we should not forget those moments, more precious for their rarity - moments such as Molloy's vision of the young woman on the beach who wishes to help him - when there is an inexplicable intrusion of sheer goodness and beauty into his grim world. Perhaps Beckett was not quite the misanthrope and pessimist he liked to pretend. He was certainly one of the wittiest, and beneath his tough intellectual carapace there is a warmth and love he never did succeed in wholly disguising.

The Grove Press edition of Beckett's Trilogy is printed in an ugly heavy blunt font; comes with that special contribution to the modern reader's hell - one of those cheap-and-nasty glued spines which split easily; and (like many of Beckett's books) is riddled with typographical errors and misprints. Potential readers would probably be better off finding the physically more handsome and durable Everyman edition, though whether it offers a more accurate text I don't know.

It's hard to top Beckett when it comes to sheer density of prose. His trilogy here is considered one of the greatest sets of novels in the 20th century, and it's a rightly deserved reputation. Here Beckett does two neat tricks over the course of the three books, first he gradually strips the story down to its very essence, that being words and sentences and phrases to the point where the story is almost pure thought processes. Second, and this is probably harder, he manages the trick of taking an absolutely bleak view of life and making it absolutely hilarious. Through absurd situations, witty asides and just general black humor there are fewer works of literature that will literally have you laughing out loud while forcing you to confront the possible pointlessness of life. At no point is any of this easy reading, Beckett's prose can be politely described as relentless and the words just keep coming, maintaining an odd, jerky sort of rhythm that manages to pull you along so that the books read much faster than you might expect. And even though it's a trilogy mostly in spirit, there are some definite progressions from book to book. Molloy is the easiest to read and makes the most sense, even if its circuitiousness can be madly frustrating sometimes. And for some reason Beckett pulls an absolutely bizarre switch halfway through that I'm not smart enough to understand. But for the most part it's fairly accessable. Malone Dies is as bleak as the name implies and is probably the funniest in a black humour sort of way. I actually found this one easiest to understand though, but that's probably not the case with everyone. And then you hit the last book The Unnamable (which I saw someone jokingly once refer to as "The Unreadable") which brings Beckett to the absolute pinnacle of his style. There's barely any description to give the reader a visual image, and whatever descriptions there are always shift, never staying still. The novel is pure thought, a series of knotted sentences managing to convey a whole range of emotions and somehow achieving a strange beauty in the process. The final few words of the novel probably sum Beckett up just as much as anything else. These aren't novels you read for plot, but for the writing and his prose makes it all worthwhile. For those readers who don't mind doing a little work in their reading to be rewarded, Beckett is probably the place to go. This trilogy stands as one of the more uniquely beautiful pieces of the 20th century. The Nobel Prize was justly deserved.

These three novels are the best of the 20th century.

They contain all the beauty, despair, and spareness that makes Beckett the patron writer of our century. They get at the core of what it means to be a self in the midst of the void, having, against one's will, a self's attendant thoughts, words, stories, and imagination. "I, say I. Unbelieving" says Beckett in the first line of The Unnamable, and you can believe him. These novels are as metaphysical as novels get, asking sincerely what it means to be. And asking just as sincerely if language can ever help us figure that out.

Each novel, with Molloy on his crutches, Malone in his death-bed, The Unnamable in his skull, is screamingly funny and cryingly horrible. Beckett's sense of the absurd and the ridiculous are only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge and overwhelming but strangely life-affirming pessimism, which helps us go on as we laugh at the world's collection of whimsies.

There are no novels better. There are few funnier. There are none containing more truth.

It's a pity more people don't read Beckett and cannot seem to enjoy him. The trilogy stands right up there with Ulysses as perhaps the greatest work of the century. With Beckett, who needs a plot? Prose has never been more austerely beautiful and never will be again, after Beckett. Yes, there are some maddening scenes in these three inter-related novels and, yes, there is no conventional "plot," but what we have is a distillation of the bare-boned dilemma of existence. When sad, pathetic, tormented Malone (let's not kid ourselves, he's Everyman) lies in his forlorn room watching the sky from his window, there is no more beautiful poetry in the English language. The moon, in Beckett, is truly the moon. At his very greatest, when he is wringing that stark, cold cosmic beauty from despair, Beckett is the finest writer of the century, better even than Joyce. Such a sad shame that this great trilogy will never be read or appreciated except by such few people. It's just the best there is. Period.

Three powerful novels, each unique and perhaps so like (and unlike) the others in style that they stand together as much as apart, and readily stand up to evaluation, even deconstruction. I found, having never read Beckett before, The Unnamable to be the finest of the three; each reader though takes a different view. I appreciated the total lack of concern with the modern conventions of the novel in the last work, and The Unnamable lives up to its title in many ways, but draws the reader in to a world of exquisite minimalism and modernity. If experimental work of a higher order is your goal, you can hardly do better than Beckett.

It seems like most of the reviews for this book fall into one of two categories. Either the reviewer thinks these novels are exquisite for what they are to a literary movement, or else they don't like them because they're boring and nothing happens. It's true that these books stand up to thorough academic scrutiny, but I also think they're fun to read. They are by no means plot-driven novels. If you're looking for a good story, keep looking. But whether or not you're able to make it through all three of these novels probably has more to do with your taste in reading than your intellectual abilities. If you're a casual reader of popular fiction, you probably won't enjoy these novels much, but if you like Joyce, Kafka, and Eggers, you'll love Beckett.

Many do not even know that Beckett wrote novels; these are his finest. Molloy itself is a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness modernism--linking a simple vagabond named Molloy, with a lofty mind, to a sinister agent corrupt in thought sent to find Molloy. As the controlled agent gets closer to who Molloy is, he himself begins to fall apart and see life differently. Malone Dies is simply the mental construction of a dying man seeking to fill out his last living moments with three imaginative "stories." All three of these novels are immersed in words and are more an experience of language. The unnamable is truly that, nothing is specified or real, but in a fictive, engrossing manner, Beckett attempts to describe the unnamble in human life without ever naming it. Each of these books are amazing independently, but they deserve to be read as a whole as they form an engrossing and closed trilogy. If you read this, you will read language crafted by Beckett which communicates the unimaginable--thoughts close to everyman, but thoughts which you thought were inexpressible with language. Don't be wary of the language, this is a reading experience that will take you whole and speedily through the pages.

Regarding the statements made in samm2's review below, I am not familiar with the school of psychology that deems it valid to judge someone's sanity based on a work of fiction he or she created. Really, this claim is a blatant fallacy, perhaps indicating the reader should spend more time with the text before bombastically labeling the author a schizophrenic. Beckett is no provider of instant gratification -- he teaches us to dig deeper, into the places where both pain and happiness are enmeshed and inseparable. Yes, all his work displays more or less the same themes -- this is what is called artistic vision, and the astute reader will know not confuse it with mental illness.

While not wishing to underplay the seriousness of this work as described by the other reviewers, I need to point out to potential readers just how amusing Beckett is. What keeps you reading this long work (and all his writing) is not the depressing sameness, for why would you bother, but the wonderful jokes and puns; bleak, black and ironical certainly, but funny as all hell. Communicating with his mother by knocking her on the head, one knock for yes, two for no! Hilarious! I love it!

Sometimes I go through long periods of time where I forget why I'm into books and writing and everything. It all seems so boring and stupid, and then life does, too. Months or years go by before I find a book like one in this trilogy.

I actually haven't finished it yet, but finishing it is the last thing I want to do. I laugh and marvel often when I read this book and often at the same time. I've never laughed at such terrible pronouncements.

It's true what they say about there being no real plot or exposition. It's difficult to find a place for this book in literature. You don't feel quite right calling it a novel, or novels, or poetry. Every page or so there's a sentence, or a pair of them, that's just a singular marvel. It's as though you took a hilarious comedian, gave him eternal life, and then caught up with him a hundred thousand years later when he was ragged and insane and forced him to write a book, which he ended up really giving his all to in spite of himself.