Abstract
Beckett’s treatment of solitude, throughout his work, pushes the issue of the solitary state to its limits: a Self without identity, with crippled or amputated body parts, a consciousness (barely), and words. It is difficult to imagine taking exilic solitude beyond this, except to begin again with variations of previous versions. In Beckett’s three-part novel, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—commonly referred to as the “trilogy”—all the narrators lie dying, “rotting with solitude,” or living out what one critic, quoting Husserl, calls “‘das einsame Seelenleben’ [the solitary life of the soul].”1 The Unnamable insists, with bitter wit, that whatever may happen to the body, the soul survives, it “being notoriously immune from deterioration and dismemberment.”2
… oh it’s only a diary, it’ll soon be over.
—Beckett, Molloy
When I think … of the time I wasted … tottering under my own skin and bones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence…
Beckett, The Unnamable
The island, I’m on the island, I’ve never left the island… The island, that’s all the earth I know.
—Beckett, The Unnamable
Never once a human voice.
Beckett, Molloy
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Notes
Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 66.
Philip Solomon, The Life After Birth: Imagery in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1975);
Philip Solomon, Samuel Beckett’ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. with an Introduction by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988);
Gönül Pultar, Techniques and Tradition in Beckett’s Trilogy of Novels (New York: University Press of America, 1996);
Thomas J. Cousineau, After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999).
For an excellent discussion of Beckett’s use of “aporia,” see Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63 ff.
Among the many books and essays that deal with aspects of Beckett and language, one is especially of interest: P. J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
Maire Jaanus Kurrick, Literature and Negation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 229, 225.
For a philosophical interpretation of the trilogy, see Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett: A Study in Ontological Parable (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Douglas Dunn, Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1975), 193.
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 75.
Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 115.
H. Porter Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 123.
James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 140.
Wylie Sypher, The Loss ofSelfin Modernist Literature and Art (Westport, CT: 1979), 147, 154–155.
Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 171–172.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For A New Novel: Essays in Fiction, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 112.
For insightful discussions on “repetition” see Rubin Rabinovitz, Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), Chapter Five, “Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Beckett’s Trilogy,” 65–105.
Magda Moorjani, “A Cryptanalysis of Beckett’s Molloy” in The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 53–72.
A recent poststructuralist study of Beckett is Anthony Uhlman, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Maurice Friedman, To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Man (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), 318, 315, 321.
See also Hélène L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981).
Israel Shenker, “An Interview with Beckett” (1956), reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 148.
Chrisopher Ricks, Beckett’s Last Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.
See Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller, The Testament of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 78ff.
On “couples,” and identity see Enrico Garzilli, Circles Without Center: Paths to the Discovery and Creation of Self in Modern Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) especially the chapter titled “The Other and Identity: The Couples of Samuel Beckett,” 28–38.
See John Fletcher, “Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers,” Comparative Literature 17 (Winter 1975): 43–56;
Ruby Cohn, “Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett,” Criticism vol. VI, no 1 (Winter 1964): 33–43;
Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1961) especially the chapter titled “The Cartesian Centaur,” reprinted in several collections.
The most recent postructuralist study of Beckett is Daniel Katz’ Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
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© 2001 Edward Engelberg
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Engelberg, E. (2001). As They Lay Dying “Rotting with Solitude”: Endgame in Beckett’s Trilogy. In: Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10598-1_8
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