Molloy

Part One: Molloy’s Journey

Molloy is telling his story from his mother’s room, though he is not entirely sure how he got there or whether he is in fact there. He may be dead. He is dictating his story in exchange for money, though whether there is anyone to give him money, and whether money means anything in his situation, is unclear from the first page. This is the condition from which the novel’s prose emerges: a narrator who cannot be trusted about the most basic facts, including his own identity, and who tells us this himself, repeatedly, while continuing to tell us things.

What Molloy narrates is a journey toward his mother’s house. He is crippled — his legs do not work reliably, and he progresses at various points by crawling, using crutches, riding a bicycle, and rolling — but he is moving, with the particular stubbornness of a Beckett character, in what he believes is the right direction. The journey is not going well. He arrives in a town, is arrested, released, encounters a shepherd and his flock, is taken in by a woman named Lousse who keeps him for an indefinite period, and continues, eventually, into a forest from which he may not emerge.

The famous sucking stones passage — in which Molloy works out, with painful and comic thoroughness, the optimal system for rotating sixteen stones between his four pockets so that each stone is sucked with equal frequency — is among the great set pieces in 20th-century fiction. It is genuinely funny, a masterpiece of logical obsession. It is also a parable for the novel itself: the project of working out a perfect system that turns out to be based on an arbitrary premise, and the discovery, after enormous effort, that the premise can simply be abandoned.

Part Two: Moran’s Report

The second half of the novel belongs to Jacques Moran, who is everything Molloy is not: orderly, authoritarian, religious, precise. Moran is a detective of some kind, and he has been assigned to find Molloy — who, the reader now understands, is perhaps a figure of pure dissolution that the orderly world needs to locate and contain. Moran’s report is addressed to his employer, Youdi, and is written in the bureaucratic first person of a man who believes in procedure.

The joke, which Beckett executes with perfect comic timing across a hundred pages, is that Moran’s journey destroys him. He sets off with his son, his bees, his careful habits, and his faith in the structures that give his life its meaning. By the time he returns — if he returns — he is as crippled and as lost as Molloy. He has become, the novel implies, something like Molloy: a dissolving self narrating an impossible journey in a language that is increasingly uncertain of its own reliability.

What the two halves mean together is the question the novel leaves open. Some readers take Molloy and Moran to be the same person at different stages of dissolution. Others read them as two kinds of consciousness — the instinctive and the rational — that the novel shows collapsing toward a common state of irreducible uncertainty. What the form insists on is that the second half cannot be understood without the first, and the first cannot be fully understood until the second is read: a structure that enacts the novel’s themes about the impossibility of arriving anywhere.

The Trilogy

Molloy is the first volume of the trilogy that Beckett wrote in French between 1947 and 1950 and translated into English himself. Malone Dies follows a man lying in bed waiting to die, who passes the time inventing stories that he cannot control. The Unnamable strips everything further: there is a narrator, possibly, in a place that cannot be described, who may or may not have generated all the previous narrators, and who continues to speak because silence is unavailable.

The trilogy is a progression toward the absolute minimum: fewer characters, less plot, less stable language, less self. By the end of The Unnamable, the prose has arrived at a condition that prose fiction had not previously reached — a voice that cannot stop, cannot affirm anything, cannot be identified with any stable consciousness, and continues anyway, ending on the line “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

This is among the most significant achievements in 20th-century literature not because it is difficult (it is) but because it is honest about something that fiction usually covers over: the uncertainty at the centre of consciousness, the way the self is constructed rather than given, the way language shapes rather than reports experience. Beckett said what the great modernists had approached but not quite arrived at. Molloy is where that arrival begins, and it is, against all odds, funny, compelling, and unlike anything else.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — The opening of Beckett’s trilogy is one of the most formally radical novels ever written, and also one of the funniest — a combination that should be impossible and that Beckett makes feel inevitable.