Beckett’s Devious Deictics

Abstract

When Beckett began The Unnamable with ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’, he was toying with the narrative convention that demands that at the beginning of stories narrators orientate their audience in respect to time, place, and person. The beginning of Molloy, for example — ‘I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now’ — appears to fulfil just such an orientating function by means of the indexical forms of language, the shifters or deictics that anchor person, time, and place to the perspective of the speaker. Deictic terms, which include personal pronouns, such as Molloy’s I, temporary forms, such as now and verb tense (am), and spatial terms (there), can be fully understood only if the hearer or reader reconstructs the position of the speaker. Such terms differ from other linguistic signs in that they are signifiers whose reference (but not signifieds) shifts according to when, where, and by whom they are used.¹ (‘Beckett’s Shifty Shifters’ would be a useful alternative title for this chapter.)