Molloy is the first of a trilogy of novels which continued with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and quickly came to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s the title of the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s and which I read this in.

Beckett wrote Molloy in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.

Molloy is in two parts of equal length. I’ve reviewed part one. This review is of part two which consists of a long first-person narrative by Jacques Moran.

Plot summary

This second part of the book features something a lot more resembling a ‘plot’ i.e. a sequence of events which make sense in themselves and seem to occur to identifiable characters, than part one did.

It’s basically a picaresque i.e. a journey with adventures. The first-person narrator, Jacques Moran, is still a bit nuts, a bit obsessive compulsive, but it feels like, for the first time in a Beckett text, there are recognisable facts, characters, and a narrative.

This is immediately visible from the way that part two is divided into paragraphs, thank God, which makes it ten times easier to read and understand than the eighty-page-long solid block of prose which makes up part one.

Part two starts with the words:

It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.

And goes on to paint the scene of the narrator in his quiet home, at night, with the lamp trimmed, starting to write his ‘report’ of events.

Moran tells us that, when the story begins he was at home one Sunday when another ‘agent’, Gaber, visits him. They don’t like each other. Moran tells his son – also called Jacques – to run and fetch a beer for the two adults. Over this beer Gaber gives him an ‘assignment’ which is to do with a certain Molloy. Moran makes clear his profession is to do with surveillance and prying.

Right from the start the narrator treats this event as if it marks a watershed in his life, as if it doomed him, as if nothing was ever the same again – a standard thriller trope designed, of course, makes the reader want to find out why.

But then… Moran’s behaviour becomes stranger and more obsessive. He obsesses about attending mass that Sunday, having missed it because of Gaber’s visit. He packs his son off to the mass but then doesn’t believe him when he comes back saying he attended. He goes to see Father Ambrose to ask for a private communion to make up for the mass he missed that morning and there is some absurdist dialogue, but embedded in the … how to describe it… the hyper-self-conscious, solipsistic, auto-obsessive, overself-awareness which is so crushingly Beckettian, conveyed in one great heavy granite block of prose.

Father Ambrose came in, rubbing his eyes. I disturb you. Father, I said. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, protestingly. I shall not describe our attitudes, characteristic his of him, mine of me. He offered me a cigar which I accepted with good grace and put in my pocket, between my fountain-pen and my propelling-pencil. He flattered himself, Father Ambrose, with being a man of the world and knowing its ways, he who never smoked. And everyone said he was most broad. I asked him if he had noticed my son at the last mass. Certainly, he said, we even spoke together. I must have looked surprised. Yes, he said, not seeing you at your place, in the front row, I feared you were ill. So I called for the dear child, who reassured me. A most untimely visitor, I said, whom I could not shake off in time. So your son explained to me, he said. He added. But let us sit down, we have no train to catch. He laughed and sat down, hitching up his heavy cassock. May I offer you a little glass of something? he said. I was in a quandary. Had Jacques let slip an allusion to the lager. He was quite capable of it. I came to ask you a favour, I said. Granted, he said. We observed each other. It’s this, I said, Sunday for me without the Body and Blood is like — . He raised his hand. Above all no profane comparisons, he said. Perhaps he was thinking of the kiss without a moustache or beef without mustard. I dislike being interrupted. I sulked. Say no more, he said, a wink is as good as a nod, you want communion. I bowed my head. It’s a little unusual, he said. I wondered if he had fed. I knew he was given to prolonged fasts, by way of mortification certainly, and then because his doctor advised it. Thus he killed two birds with one stone. Not a word to a soul, he said, let it remain between us and — . He broke off, raising a finger, and his eyes, to the ceiling. Heavens, he said, what is that stain? I looked in turn at the ceiling. Damp, I said. Tut tut, he said, how annoying. The words tut tut seemed to me the maddest I had heard. There are times, he said, when one feels like weeping. He got up. I’ll go and get my kit, he said. He called that his kit. Alone, my hands clasped until it seemed my knuckles would crack.

There is a lot of ‘business’ in Moran’s house, with his ancient serving woman, Martha, who cordially hates him and cooks inedible meals which he insults, and then with his son.

In a deliberately anti-romantic and plain weird scene, the narrator describes in some detail administering an enema to his son, making him lie on the floor of the toilet with his bum in the air to keep the hot water in his bowels as long as possible, before giving in and having a poo. They both examine the stringy waste which has exited his anus into the toilet bowl. Maybe some readers find this ‘darkly funny’. I would suggest it is intended to be – and is – revolting.

This is a bullet point summary of the plot:

• Gaber visits Moran at home in his garden (p.86 of the Picador volume of The Beckett Trilogy)
• Gaber informs him that the mission is to find Molloy and that his son will go with him (p.87)
• Gaber leaves and Moran worries that the beer he’s just shared with him (a Wallenstein) renders him ineligible for Mass, and he always takes Mass on a Sunday (p.90)
• absurdly, Moran’s first thoughts are for the vehicle he will set out on, and he spends some time considering his autocycle (p.90)
• Moran goes to visit Father Ambrose who, after some chat, administers Mass from his ‘kit’ (p.92)
• they discuss the health of Moran’s grey hen who will neither brood nor lay; Father Ambrose suggests dietary changes (p.93)
• Moran returns home to eat the disappointing stew his servant, Martha, has prepared then goes lies down in his room and is cross when his son enters without knocking – he might have caught him masturbating which Moran, apparently, does quite often (p.94)
• his son complains about having to go on a mission because his tooth aches and he wants to get it seen to by Dr Py (p.95); already it’s plain that Moran hates his son and loses no opportunity to shout at him, criticise him and so on

It’s noticeable how the quality of the narrative deteriorates. The opening pages contained lots of details calmly observed and maybe it is a parody of a conventional novel. By this stage, however, it has sunk into the characteristic sludge of unknowing, the murky repetitions and the know-nothing mood of the typical Beckettian Alzheimer’s patient.

What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know

This is Beckett’s schtick, his trademark sound, his brand, the one central idea of unknowability and confusion which he has brought to a peak of perfection on the previous novels and stories, and will go on to recycle ten thousand ways through the rest of his career.

• he tells us about his neighbours, the Elsner sisters, their cook Hannah and their dog Zulu (p.96)
• Moran reflects on the relationship between the ‘messengers’ and the ‘agents’ in his organisation, a page of almost complete irrelevance (p.98)
• we learn the chief of the organisation which he and Gaber belongs to is named Youdi (p.99)
• he makes a huge fuss about his son’s stamp albums; his son won’t go anywhere without his prize stamps and Moran had told him he could only take his second best and smaller stamp album, so Moran thinks he catches his son transferring his favourite stamps from his big stamp album to the smaller one which Moran has told him he can bring with – there’s three pages of this, a prime example of Beckett’s studied inconsequentiality and, within the story, of Moran’s bullying of the boy. If you think bullying teenage children is fun, this is the book for you (p.100)
• writers spend a lot of time by themselves, in bedrooms, staring at blank pages or blank computer screens; a certain kind of writer becomes obsessed by the functioning of their own bodies, and minute self-observance. Beckett is their patron saint. Having bullied his son he has a few hours to kill before dinner and gets into bed, describing the unfolding of his thoughts and sensations in a kind of directionless noodling (p.101)

I still had a few hours left before dinner. I decided to make the most of them. Because after dinner I drowse. I took off my coat and shoes, opened my trousers and got in between the sheets. It is lying down, in the warmth, in the gloom, that I best pierce the outer turmoil’s veil, discern my quarry, sense what course to follow, find peace in another’s ludicrous distress. Far from the world, its clamours, frenzies, bitterness and dingy light, I pass judgement on it and on those, like me, who are plunged in it beyond recall, and on him who has need of me to be delivered, who cannot deliver myself. All is dark, but with that simple darkness that follows like a balm upon the great dismemberings. From their places masses move, stark as laws. Masses of what? One does not ask. There somewhere man is too, vast conglomerate of all of nature’s kingdoms, as lonely and as bound. And in that block the prey is lodged and thinks himself a being apart. Anyone would serve. But I am paid to seek. I arrive, he comes away. His life has been nothing but a waiting for this, to see himself preferred, to fancy himself damned, blessed, to fancy himself everyman, above all others. Warmth, gloom, smells of my bed, such is the effect they sometimes have on me. I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena. It is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work. It is thanks to them I find myself a meaning. So he whom a sudden pain awakes. He stiffens, ceases to breathe, waits, says. It’s a bad dream, or, it’s a touch of neuralgia, breathes again, sleeps again, still trembling. And yet it is not unpleasant, before setting to work, to steep oneself again in this slow and massive world, where all things move with the ponderous sullenness of oxen, patiently through the immemorial ways, and where of course no investigation would be possible. But on this occasion, I repeat, on this occasion, my reasons for doing so were I trust more serious and imputable less to pleasure than to business. For it was only by transferring it to this atmosphere, how shall I say, of finality without end, why not, that I could venture to consider the work I had on hand. For where Molloy could not be, nor Moran either for that matter, there Moran could bend over Molloy. And though this examination prove unprofitable and of no utility for the execution of my orders, I should nevertheless have established a kind of connection, and one not necessarily false. For the falsity of the terms does not necessarily imply that of the relation, so far as I know. And not only this, but I should have invested my man, from the outset, with the air of a fabulous being, which something told me could not fail to help me later on. So I took off my coat and my shoes, I opened my trousers and I slipped in between the sheets, with an easy conscience, knowing only too well what I was doing.

• Molloy is, of course, the name of the narrator of part one of the book, who it is named after – Moran has only a shaky grasp of Molloy’s name and mistakenly calls him Mollose or Mellose (p.103)
• he has a hallucinatory vision of Molloy as a vague and menacing shape (p.105); identities are fluid and multiple

The fact was there were three, no, four Molloys. He that inhabited me, my caricature of same, Gaber’s and the man of flesh and blood somewhere awaiting me. To these I would add Youdi’s were it not for Gaber’s corpse fidelity to the letter of his messages. Bad reasoning. For could it seriously be supposed that Youdi had confided to Gaber all he knew, or thought he knew (all one to Youdi) about his protege? Assuredly not. He had only revealed what he deemed of relevance for the prompt and proper execution of his orders. I will therefore add a fifth Molloy, that of Youdi.

• he has a miserable dinner served by Martha, shepherd’s pie which he tells her is revolting, she says she’s noticed they’re leaving on a mission soon, Moran is furious at his son for telling her, his son says he didn’t and anyway has a stomach ache (p.108)
• Moran administers a hot enema to his son, not without a struggle, then he has a poo, then they examine the fibrous threads floating in the yellowy liquid in the toilet bowl (p.109)
• suddenly Moran experiences a stabbing pain in  his leg and falls; he administers painkilling gel; this is the first sign of the deterioration of his legs which will become a central theme of the mission (p.110)
• Moran makes much of the cigar he’s smoking; he checks on his son’s stamp collection again; he goes for a stroll round his garden; we discover the local town is named Turdy ha ha (p.112)
• an absurdist description of the inappropriate clothing Moran packs for the trip including a straw boater and an umbrella (p.114)
• Moran describes the huge metal ring which carries all the keys to every lockable item in his house (p.115)
• in the middle of the night he wakes his son to start the journey, but the son rolls on the bedroom floor screaming with anger and defiance, ‘You pig’, Moran calls him (p.116)
• Moran goes out into the garden and chops wood until his fury has abated then goes back to his son’s room to find him crying, but packing (p.117)
• they set off; Moran considers at length the merits of roping himself or maybe chaining himself to his son (p.119)
• Moran asks him about the complicated penknife he gave his son as a gift and then shouts at him to give it to him; his son does so, holding back his tears (p.120)
• for the first time we hear about ‘the voice’ which drives Moran on:

And if I submit to this paltry scrivening which is not of my province, it is for reasons very different from those that might be supposed. I am still obeying orders, if you like, but no longer out of fear. No, I am still afraid, but simply from force of habit. And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fulfil in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should. And this with hatred in my heart, and scorn, of my master and his designs. Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it none the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I know what it means, and in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments. But this evening, this morning, I have drunk a little more than usual and tomorrow I may be of a different mind. It also tells me, this voice I am only just beginning to know, that the memory of this work brought scrupulously to a close will help me to endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom. (p.121)

It is odd that Beckett has a reputation for brevity, when these prose works are the extreme opposite of brief, they manage to spool endless reams of text and psychological convolutions out of the most minute scruples and distinctions.

• Moran tells us the town Molloy lives in is called Bally and the region surrounding it Ballyba, just as he comes from the town of Turdy and the region around it is called Turdyba (p.123) this sounds almost science fiction-y
• it is a long journey as if across uninhabited unknown terrain; Moran shows his son how to make a shelter out of branches; they live off tinned fish and biscuits (p.124)
• Moran tells us about a few previous missions: the Yerk affair took 3 months and concluded when he destroyed Yerk’s hatpin; another one consisted simply of bringing a certain person to a certain place at a certain time; he refers to the people he meets or deals with as ‘patients’ (p.126) all reads like a parody of a spy novel
• he feels another stabbing pain in his knee and carries out a lengthy investigation (p.128)
• the extended passage where he tells his son to go to the nearest town, Hole, and buy a bicycle, gives him £5 in ten shilling notes to do so, but the son insists he only gave him four pounds ten whereupon they have one of Beckett’s long, drawn-out enumerations or cataloguing of all possible variations on how 10 ten-shilling notes could be combined (p.130)
• when his son seems reluctant to go, Moran throws stones at him then describes his eccentric method of running which often terrifies people (p.133)
• Moran takes advantage of being alone in the forest by the camp they’ve made to have a wank (p.133) you should never underestimate the amount of wanking, farting, pooing and pissing in Beckett
• a man comes out of the wood with a stick and a shock of white hair and asks for some bread, divides it between his two pockets, then goes back into the woods (p.134)
• he – or the text – experiences that sense of alienation from himself, splitting of identities, himself in the third person

And it was not so much Moran as another, in the secret of Moran’s sensations exclusively, who said, No change, Moran, no change. This may seem impossible…

• it becomes clear that this day Moran spends waiting for his son to buy a bike in Hole and return with it, is The First Day
• another man appears out of the dark wood wearing a navy blue suit and outrageously wide black shoes, looming up at him in a strange and menacing way and the next thing Moran knows he is lying on the ground with his head beaten to a pulp (p.139) Moran drags him into the shelter, then out again and over to a copse, dismantles the shelter and throws the branches over him
• he discovers his huge keyring has broken in the exertion and, what with his bad leg, doesn’t want to bend down to pick up each of the scattered keys, so lies down on his stomach and pulls himself around the grass to collect them (p.140) reduced to dragging himself across the mire
• Moran jams his straw boater onto his head, puts his son’s raincoat over his arm, takes his umbrella and climbs up to a vantage point and scans the horizon (p.141)
• he asks himself a series of rhetorical questions, some of which he can’t answer, eats his last tin of sardines and biscuits: thus passes The Third Day (p.142)
• his son arrives back with a bicycle; they have a massive row about the cost and Moran insists on seeing a receipt and getting the change (p.141)
• they try to mount the bicycle, with all their baggage but, rather inevitably, fall off (p.144)
• they cycle downhill into Ballyba although the journey, hallucinatorily, seems to stretch out for days (p.145)
• the encounter a shepherd with sheep and a sheepdog (p.146)
• that night Moran has yet another furious row with his son and in the morning he’s left, with the bike and the money (p.148)
• Moran struggles on, betraying more and more signs of exhaustion and mental decline, until Gaber arrives with the simple message that Moran must go home, instanter (p.150)
• he describes the spavined, crippled rate at which he limps home using his umbrella as a crutch, fifteen steps and a rest; Gaber tells him to return in August or September, it takes him six months to get home (p.152)
• he virtually crawls home, eating moss and getting the shits (p.153)

Certain mosses I consumed must have disagreed with me. I if I once made up my mind not to keep the hangman waiting, the bloody flux itself would not stop me, I would get there on all fours shitting out my entrails and chanting maledictions.

• out of nowhere a barrage of 16 theological questions assail him, such as Does nature observe the sabbath? followed by 17 practical questions, for example, what has become of my hens? (p.154)
• he embarks on a detailed two-page description of the dance of bees (p.155) very like the obsessively detailed enumeration of steps or procedures which pack Watt
• he hears The Voice increasingly talking to him; his clothes rot to his body, it rains, it hails and he is torn whether to use the umbrella for protection against the elements or as the crutch which he now requires (p.157)
• he finds himself on the land of a big ruddy farmer accusing him of trespassing and spins a cock and bull story about being on a pilgrimage to see the black Madonna of Turdy before paying him off with a florin (p.159)
• he arrives home to find the house abandoned, Martha gone, everything empty and cold, the beehive empty except a little dust of annulets and wings (p.161)
• it is a year since Moran set out; he settles back in and receives a visit from Gaber who wants a ‘report’, and from Father Ambrose; a throwaway remark tells us that his son is back, too; he is sleeping (p.161)
• he needs crutches permanently now; he wonders if he’ll meet Moran; The Voice comes to him all the time; it uses a language unlike the language Moran learned; he will learn it; he will write his report; and the text ends with the words it opened with (see below) (p.162)

Bodies and Sex

The text throughout evinces what the narrator aptly describes as ‘horror of the body and its functions’. The most vivid example of this horror and disgust is administering the enema to his son.

The narrator tells us that he masturbates fairly regularly.

I fiddled with the knee-cap. It felt like a clitoris.

The dominant physical element to the narrative is the way Moran physically decays during the story (as all Beckett characters do; it’s in the contract). His legs go and he is forced to make crutches. By the end of the long stay in the forest, he can only get around by lying down and pulling himself with his hands. In other words, identical to the experiences of Molloy in his forest. Are they the same person transposing the same experiences onto two fictional identities? Or not? Perhaps. I don’t know.

Arcana

As mentioned in my review of part one, writing in French appears to have cleansed Beckett’s vocabulary of the infestation of incunabula and learned vocabulary which clots the earlier texts, the florid displays of arcane terminology. But there are still some choice terminology:

• Personally I just liked plants, in all innocence and simplicity. I even saw in them at times a superfetatory proof of the existence of God.
• I was about to conclude as usual that it was just another bad dream when a fulgurating pain went through my knee.
• Did I even know the amount I had brought with me? No. To me too I cheerfully applied the maieutic method.
• And I who a fortnight before would joyfully have reckoned how long I could survive on the provisions that remained, probably with reference to the question of calories and vitamins, and established in my head a series of menus asymptotically approaching nutritional zero, was now content to note feebly that I should soon be dead of inanition, if I did not succeed in renewing my provisions.

It may or may not be significant that the arcane words become more common in the second part of part two, as Moran slowly loses his identity, comes more under the influence of ‘The Voice’ and – possibly, in some sense, maybe, is beginning to morph into Molloy.

It also coincides with increasing frequency of maybe the single easiest identifier of Beckett’s prose style, the phrase ‘I don’t know’.

• But then he would have seen I was ill. Not that I was exactly ill. And why did I not want him to know I was ill? I don’t know.
• Have you a tongue in your head? he said. I don’t know you, I said.
• I fancy he would have liked me for a friend. I don’t know what became of him.
• Do you imagine a second-hand bicycle costs four pounds ten shillings? I said. I don’t know, he said. I did not know either.
• That night I had a violent scene with my son. I do not remember about what. Wait, it may be important. No, I don’t know.

One one level, if you just pay attention to the number of times the narrator and the characters say ‘I don’t know’, I found all this ignorance, stupidity and unknowing eventually made me want to scream. You have to get into his world where not-knowing is the basic condition of all humans.

Humour

Probably, as with part one, there are standalone passages you could take out of context and read as funny, for example the dialogue with the priest, Father Ambrose. But Moran starts out weird and gets much weirder. Above all the entire text is dominated by his bullying relationship with his son who he is constantly berating and criticising. This incessant bullying creates an oppressive and horrible atmosphere.

And then in the blurred days in the forest he apparently beats a stranger’s head to a pulp, drags the body into his shelter, then out of it again, and buries it under forest debris. Maybe some people would find this funny.

So you might be able to isolate certain passages and claim they have a kind of retarded humour – such as the extended passage where he argues with his son about the money he’s giving him to buy a bicycle. But I simply found the occasional moments of ‘humour’ imaginatively outweighed by the oppressivenesss of Moran’s bullying and then murdering.

Avant-garde

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. You might decide to be a bit different and use quail’s eggs or seagull eggs or penguin eggs, but they’re still eggs, they have a yolk and a white, the omelette comes out looking yellow.

Words have meanings. That’s what they’re for. Unlike painting or sculpture, texts cannot be ‘abstract’ because they use words and each word conveys meaning and carries connotations from the reader or audience’s entire previous experience of its usage. Even the Surrealists, even the Dadaists who set out to destroy everything, discovered you can’t destroy language. As soon as you start using words, or anything which sounds remotely like words, the human brain is designed and trained to leap on them, complete them, complete phrases and supply a world of meanings. As the Unnamable puts it, in the last book of the Trilogy:

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing,

Anyway, Beckett’s texts are very far from being as consciously destructive and avant-garde as Dadaism.

On the back cover blurb and the Wikipedia article about this book, writers and critics queue up to tell us how Beckett revolutionised the novel by throwing out narrative, character, events, meaning and so on. It would be a remarkable achievement if he had truly done that.

But he hasn’t. There is a narrative, as I have summarised above, and there are characters and there are events. Moran is visited by a fellow agent, goes to meet the local priest, discusses the health of his hens and his bees, has extended encounters with his son and his servant Martha around his house, describes his spinster neighbours and their little doggy, before he sets off on his long mission, has an extended argument with his son about buying a bicycle and, while his son is away, gets into a fight with a stranger who he appears to murder and bury.

To be sure, these incidents are reported in a weirdly solipsistic and brain-damaged style, by a narrator with only a shaky grasp on reality who continually wonders if any of it happened or is real. That aspect – the demented style the whole thing is told in – is weird and unusual. But nonetheless, there is a central narrator, there are characters – son, Martha, Gaber, Father Ambrose, the shady men in the forest – and there are events.

Thus, in my opinion, all talk of Beckett throwing out traditional aspects of the novel are misleading. All the traditional aspects are still there, just subjected to weird distortions.

Final twists

1. Ending with the beginning

Much is made of the final words of the text. If you recall, part two opens with the sentences:

It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft and steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning.

80 pages later, after the heterdemalion of verbiage and disintegrating consciousness we’ve been subjected to, Moran arrives back at his house and sits down to write:

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

So an obvious thought is implied by this ending: that the text is circular; that the text ends with him sitting down to write the text we have just read, with the twist that it is not true. If he has made up the facts about it being midnight and it not raining, what else has he made up?

Once again, this is presented by critics in awe of Beckett’s greatness as if it was a major undermining of The Novel – and yet for at least a hundred years before this book was published, tricksy, clever novelists had been experimenting with all forms of unreliable narrator whose narrative is not to be taken at face value.

But the quote should be put in context.

I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his turn had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

2. Does Moran become Molloy?

The other big question often raised about the text is the notion that Moran himself is metamorphosing into someone else. This is suggested by two things:

1. the obvious fact that he refers to himself, Moran, in the third person, as if he’s ceasing to be Moran
2. the growing presence of the ‘voice’ which has been telling him to do things and which is referred to more and more – the voice in his head, which some critics see as a new identity taking him over

This is the evidence some critics use to suggest that part two is really the prequel to part one and that, after all his tribulations, at the end of part two, Moran is morphing into the character named Molloy and then goes on to have the adventures described in part one.

This has a neat tricksy arty feel about it but doesn’t make strict sense if you come to examine the details of both narratives… but then not much in this dense 160 pages of text makes sense anyway, so why not – and it’s fun trying to map out and sustain this theory, in a rather Rubik’s cube, Sudoku kind of way, as many scholars have.

Anyway. My point would be that the book isn’t about the ‘plot’, the plot is secondary, or almost irrelevant. It is about the prose.

Ten thousand ways of being negative

• What then was the source of Ballyba’s prosperity? I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you nothing. Nothing.
• Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.

You can’t help being impressed by the apparently endless number of ways Beckett finds for conveying the essentially identical sentiment of mental and physical collapse and amnesia.

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Credit

Molloy by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1950. The English translation by Beckett himself with help from Patrick Bowles was published in 1955. Page references are to the Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.

Related links

• Molloy online

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

• More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) Short stories
• Murphy (1938) Novel

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

• Watt (written 1945, pub.1953) Novel
• Mercier and Camier (1946) Novel
• First Love (1946) Short story
• The Expelled (1946) Short story
• The Calmative (1946) Short story
• The End (1946) Short story
• Molloy 1 (1951) Novel
• Molloy 2 (1951) Novel
• Malone Dies (1951) Novel
• The Unnamable (1953) Novel

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

• All That Fall (1957) Radio play
• *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
• *Endgame (1958) Stage play
• *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
• *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
• Embers (1959) – Radio play
• The Old Tune (1960) adaptation of a radio play by French writer Robert Pinget
• *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
• Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
• Words and Music (1961) Radio play
• Cascando (1961) Radio play
• *Play (1963) Stage play
• Film (1963) Scenario for a film
• All Strange Away (1964) Short prose
• Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short prose
• How it Is (1964) Novel
• Enough (1965) Short prose
• Ping (1966) Short prose
• *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
• Eh Joe (1967) Television play
• *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

• Lessness (1970) Short prose
• The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
• *Not I (1972) Stage play
• Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
• Heard in the Dark, One evening and others – Short prose pieces
• *That Time (1975) Stage play
• *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
• Ghost Trio (1976) Television play
• …but the clouds… (1977) Television play
• Company (1980) Novella
• *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play (Beckett on Film production)
• *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
• Quad I + II (1981) Television play
• Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
• *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
• *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
• Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
• Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
• *What Where (1983) Stage play
• Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 1
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 2
• Samuel Beckett timeline