“all that is needed is to wander and let wander, be this slow boundless whirlwind and every particle of its dust, it’s impossible.”
The final book of the trilogy is the most extreme and puzzling of the set, and manages to be as vivid and enjoyable as its predecessors while withholding from the reader all certainties, a facet exemplified by the fact that the “I” of the text is itself the novel’s deepest mystery. The voice of the book, which stands as its only guarantee, and which for the majority of the novel is presented in one colossal paragraph (as in Part 1 of Molloy), abstracts itself into an epistemological ether in which all is subject to questioning and ambiguity, all drenched in mist, all topics pliable and transient, all goals bound to produce nothing else but more of the words that make them, the human paradigm being an anonymous sphere of discursive potential, and language the supreme prison. The central tension of the text is between the supposedly forced continuance of the voice and the voice’s desire for an absolute silence, a total condition of non-being. It is in this dilemma that the book find perhaps its greatest strength: the fundamentality of its concerns. Beckett explores the ideas of being vs. non-being, stillness vs. pain, self and self-conception, thoughts and expression, futility and perseverance, with incredible depth and scope, dropping plenty of stunning lines along the way. Beckett’s humor is present as well, though, in contrast to the altitude of the book’s discussions, the humor is often earthier and more vulgar than in the previous novels, and the voice seems the most profane and discontented of the trilogy’s narrators. The Unnamable was, for me, the most difficult to warm up to of the three novels, but for all its obscurity and extended wandering, the book speaks with such singularity and truth that it is difficult to call it anything other than a success. While it may lack the sensory magic of Molloy, and the flawless craftsmanship of Malone dies, The Unnamable is more cognitively spectacular than its predecessors, a work whose point-blank distance both confounds and enthralls the reader, whose voice calls from atop the trilogy as from a minaret, leading the listener into themselves, into their own maze of mirrors.
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“Samuel Beckett Bridge” by Daniel Dudek is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license here.
