Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably
one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took
dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had
to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would
ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low
diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style.
His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary.
It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is
the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of
comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page
figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales
all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran
through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my
mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that
I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets,
or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of
trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me,
like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and
notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained
obscure.
This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator
loses patience and throws the stones away.
And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise.
So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus (amazon)
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, by SB, Everyman's Library, 1997
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Novels-Molloy-Malone-Unnamable-ebook/dp/B005012OH6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1512117974&sr=1-1&keywords=samuel+beckett
There is a kind of sublimity in a
writer’s being able to
face with such honesty and courage a
vision of life
so pessimistic while at the same time
retaining
the inner freedom that enables him
to laugh and to create.
Samuel Beckett: A Study of His
Novels, by Eugene Webb, University of Washington Press,
1970 (accessible via scribd)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
