What a trilogy of despair and hopelessness this is!

Or, at least, that's the way I remember it. After I read this, I'd pretty much had enough of Beckett for a while.

If you've ever wanted to get inside the mind of a hopelessly trapped person and then do it again, these three novels are for you!

I should really re-read these, but the usual reason not to holds: there are too many things I haven't read yet that my reading time can be better spent on.

Beckett's works often explore the themes of human existence, isolation, and the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.

The characters in these novels are often trapped in their own minds, unable to break free from their circumstances.

Reading these novels can be a powerful and sometimes disturbing experience, but it can also give us a deeper understanding of the human condition.

Perhaps one day, when I have more time and have exhausted my other reading options, I will return to these novels and explore them again.

Until then, they will remain on my bookshelf, a reminder of the power of literature to explore the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Molloy:

What did I just peruse? Uncertain. However, there was a certain hypnotic charm to the simplified,近乎孩童般的散文风格, I must concede. Almost Oulipo-like. I'm starting to think Beckett was the ultimate literary troll, wasn't he? The stream-of-consciousness at times veers into the nonsensical. I suppose much of it is metaphorical, intended to represent various phases of life and hardships that we all have to endure, most of us anyway. The challenges of communication, loss, grief, solitude, and establishing human connection. The difficulties of describing the world "objectively". Can that even be accomplished? Are Molloy and Moran the same individual? Exhausting.

Malone Dies:

A predominantly lugubrious meditation on death and dying that transforms into an absurd, seemingly pointless slasher extravaganza at the conclusion. The back cover of my edition (Grove Press) suggests that there is hope here, a hopefulness and positivity despite all the "blasphemies against man" (NYT Book Review). Hmm. No, I'm not convinced I detected any hope in this. There is a certain wry, dark sense of humor, absurdity, and playfulness with language, indeed. But not much hope and positivity.

The Unnamable:

Once more, some interesting wordplay, yet on the whole bordering on incomprehensibility. Abstract reflections on identity, death, and the afterlife.

These notes pertain to "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable" from Beckett's trilogy, presented in an Evergreen Black Cat edition (a subsidiary of Grove Press) that I have been lugging around for decades.

In "The Unnamable", a disembodied voice emerges, bombarding us with a deluge of words. After a page or two, it is given the most meager of bodies - a limbless, immobile trunk, seated on a rock in a featureless void, capable of doing nothing but staring straight ahead, while slightly less insubstantial figures like Molloy and Malone circle around like revolving satellites.

Eventually, we encounter the most sustained piece of narrative. A figure, perhaps an earlier incarnation of our voice or an analogue with slightly more movement (able only to turn from side to side or slump forward), is imprisoned in a large glass jar as a decoration above a restaurant's outdoor menu display. The only indication that the figure is alive is the landlady of the restaurant periodically performing certain services.

The whole concept might be a nihilistic interpretation of the ideas regarding mind, consciousness, and the senses of 18th-century philosophers - Condillac's Statue comes to mind. And, of course, there is Beckett's general preoccupation with the futility of human endeavor.

In "Malone Dies", the narrator is largely immobilized, confined to a bed in a room, with no recollection of how he got there. A hand periodically opens the door just enough to place a bowl of soup on a table, which he then drags towards himself with a hooked stick, and from which his chamber pot is removed. With his movement so restricted, he has a pencil barely long enough to hold and a notebook in which he writes a description of the foregoing and a stream of reminiscences of what might or might not be his own life. He is unsure if he is still alive or if his stream of writing and attendant consciousness actually constitutes "thinking".

Even this description implies more narrative motion than is truly occurring. I push myself through, sometimes delighting in the structural elegance of a series of sentences, sometimes actually engaging with a "story" for a page or two. It probably merits multiple readings.

I read this article while listening to its audio version, which truly enhanced many aspects of the work. It added a new dimension to my understanding and made the experience more immersive.

“The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, that I shall have to. I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never” (Unnamable, 331-332). This passage highlights the complex relationship between language, memory, and our compulsion to express ourselves.

Life, movement, and inquiry are constantly confounded by a failing memory, history, and language. Our creative endeavors drive us to new places and pose new questions, but we must reconfigure our old knowledge and systems to reach those destinations. As a result, old methods recede, and new modalities emerge. Each moment is a continuation of serial contingency, the manifestation of necessary delusions. The recognition of the absurd attempt to attain the unobtainable reveals the gap between belief and truth. This gap is a double sign of both failure and success, as it points to the inability of closure while allowing the movement necessary for reflection.

Here's another thought-provoking quote from Žižek. “The universe is...a positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed...It means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. And I am even ready to go to the end and claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this. It's called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance...love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not ‘I love you all’, love means I pick out something, it's a structure of imbalance...in this quite formal sense, love is evil” (Slavoj Žižek in the film “Žižek!”). This perspective on love challenges our traditional notions and forces us to consider its deeper implications.