Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett

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Book Reviews of Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Book Review: Comedy and compassion in a world of fictions.
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

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.

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