Where to Start with Samuel Beckett: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Samuel Beckett — whether to begin with Molloy, Malone Dies, or Waiting for Godot. A complete reading guide to his fiction and drama.
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) — born in Dublin, educated at Trinity College, lived most of his adult life in Paris, and wrote with equal facility in English and French — is one of the central figures of modernist and post-war literature. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. His drama (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape) transformed the theatre; his fiction (the Trilogy — Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable — and the shorter prose works) transformed what the novel could be asked to do and what it could admit it could not do. Beckett is concerned, always, with the inability to know and the inability to stop: the consciousness that cannot determine where it is or what it is or even whether it exists, and that must nevertheless continue to speak.
Where to Start: Molloy (1951)
The best entry into Beckett’s fiction — the most narratively present of the three Trilogy novels, and the place where his concerns are most clearly established against a still-legible human situation. Part one: Molloy, old, one-legged, lying in what may be his mother’s room, narrates a journey across a landscape he barely understands toward his mother, losing his bicycle, losing the use of his second leg, ending in a forest and then a ditch. Part two: Moran, ordered by his employer Youdi to find Molloy, sets out with his son on this mission and returns home alone, transformed, writing a report that may be what we have just read.
The comedy is real — Molloy’s obsessive relationship with his sixteen sucking-stones (distributed between his four pockets by a system he eventually abandons), his transactions with the police — and the pathos is real. This is Beckett at his most accessible: there is still something like a journey, something like a quest, something like a story. What is not there is any certainty about what it means or where it ends.
Malone Dies (1951)
The second Trilogy novel — Malone, lying in a room, waiting to die, passing the time by telling himself stories. He has a pencil, an exercise book, and various objects he can reach with a stick; he believes he will die soon; he tries to take inventory of his situation and to tell stories about a figure called Macmann (or possibly Saposcat, or possibly himself). The stories keep getting away from him — they cease to be stories and become something else, or they collapse, or he forgets what he was saying.
Malone Dies is Beckett’s most comic novel in the Trilogy — Malone’s resignation to his situation, his periodic irritation with his own stories, his precise and useless inventory of his possessions — and the easiest to read after Molloy.
The Unnamable (1953)
The third Trilogy novel — and the point at which Beckett strips away the last vestiges of narrative. The Unnamable is a voice: it does not know if it is speaking or being spoken, does not know who it is or where it is (possibly a headless, limbless torso in a jar outside a restaurant; possibly something else). It cannot stop. The novel is Beckett’s most extreme formal achievement: 120 pages of compulsive, self-questioning, self-undermining speech, ending with the most famous line in post-war literature: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’
Best approached after Molloy and Malone Dies; fully comprehensible only in the context of the Trilogy as a whole.
Reading Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s work requires a different kind of reading than most fiction: not the suspension of disbelief but the suspension of the expectation of narrative certainty. His narrators do not know what is happening, cannot determine whether what they report is reliable, and admit this uncertainty with complete honesty. The comedy — and Beckett is very funny — comes from the precision with which these uncertain, deteriorating, verbose figures conduct their attempts to understand and report their situation. Begin with Molloy for the most accessible fiction; read Waiting for Godot if you want to encounter Beckett in the theatre first — the plays and the prose illuminate each other.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Samuel Beckett?
Molloy (1951) is the best starting point for readers approaching Beckett's fiction — the first of the three novels that make up the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), in which a decrepit man narrates his journey toward his mother and a second narrator, Moran, narrates his search for Molloy. It is the most conventionally narrative of the three (there is still something happening, still something like a journey and a quest) while introducing Beckett's essential concerns: the impossibility of knowing where one is, who one is, or what one is doing; the compulsion to continue despite the absence of reason to do so. Waiting for Godot is the best starting point for readers who want to encounter Beckett in the theatre.
What is Molloy about?
Molloy (1951) has two parts. In the first, Molloy — old, one-legged, uncertain of nearly everything — narrates a journey from a ditch back toward his mother, passing through a town and across a forest, losing his bicycle and his leg, ending in another ditch near what may or may not be his mother's room. In the second, Moran — a bourgeois, rule-following man with a son — receives a commission from his employer Youdi to find Molloy, sets out on this mission, and returns home entirely changed, having written a report that may be the first half of the novel. The two parts mirror and undermine each other; the relationship between them (Who is narrating? Are both parts the same story? What is the Youdi organisation?) is never resolved.
What is The Unnamable about?
The Unnamable (1953) is the third and most extreme of Beckett's Trilogy — narrated by a voice that does not know its own identity, cannot determine whether it is speaking or being spoken, and cannot stop. The Unnamable is unable to move, possibly just a head, possibly a voice in a jar; it cannot say who it is but cannot stop trying. The novel is Beckett's most radical formal experiment: it strips away the last vestiges of narrative (no character, no setting, no event) to leave only the compulsive forward motion of language itself. 'I can't go on, I'll go on' is its final line and its argument: speech, narration, consciousness continue because they cannot stop, even when they have nothing to say.
Is Beckett difficult to read?
Beckett is unlike most novelists in that his difficulty is not one of obscurity — his sentences are clear, even simple — but of ontological disorientation: his narrators do not know where they are, who they are, or what they are doing, and the reader is placed in the same condition. The difficulty increases across the Trilogy (Molloy is the most navigable; The Unnamable is the most extreme). Readers who approach Beckett expecting conventional narrative will find him incomprehensible; readers who understand that the confusion is the point — that the inability to know or to stop are his central themes — will find him comic, precise, and profoundly serious. Starting with his plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame) before the fiction is a reasonable approach.
