Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

In his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett explores the frailty of existence.

In the first novel, the unreliable narrator recounts his decline but through the monologue, the reader learns not so much his past as declining state of mind. From his phrases and sentences, we realize how far he has departed from reality and how little we can trust his words. And even Molloy couldn't trust his recollection of events and his perception of world. In the second part of the first novel, the narrator Moran, a private detective searching for Molloy, follows a similar decline into delusion and his world becomes as unreal as Molloy's. As if they are the same person.

In Malone Dies, an old man confined to an asylum recounts his story and that of a boy named Sapo. But here, as in Molloy, the unreliable narrator conveys not so much the events as his delusion and decline. And we see Malone's death on the last page of the novel through the paragraphs and sentences distorting into fragments to reflect the narrator's last thoughts.

Samuel Beckett

“Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or
or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never
or with his pencil or with his stick or
or light light I mean
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more ” from Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies.

Beckett's Birthplace: Foxrock, Ireland (Photo by Sarah777)

In The Unnamable, the narrator asks " What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?" As if only a nameless person, perhaps a nonexistent person, can seek to act and to live. The narrator claims to have created Molloy, Malone and other characters in Samuel Beckett's novels, and like them, he also struggles to communicate reality and follows the same path toward non-existence.

Beckett's trilogy is a postmodern fiction, not a meta-fiction but a story where the plot collapses and character and, even more so, style dominates. Through the narrators' babbling and occasional insight, through the fragmented thoughts and distorted sentences, we learn about their psyche, isolated and delusional. And we realize Beckett is describing postmodern men and women.