Murphy (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Samuel Beckett
- First Published: 1938
- Type of Work: Absurdist narrative
- Time of Work: The undefined present (c. 1938)
- Setting: Dublin, London, and between these two cities
- Principal Characters: Murphy, Celia, Neary, Miss Counihan, Cooper, Wylie
- Genres: Long fiction, Absurdist literature
- Subjects: Suffering, Philosophy or philosophers, Psychology or psychologists, Prostitution or prostitutes, England or English people, Pain, Unemployment or unemployed workers, Death or dying, London, Existentialism, Ireland or Irish people, Isolation
- Locales: London, England, Dublin, Ireland
The Novel
To describe “what happens” in this novel is to describe the attempts of the protagonist to avoid having anything happen at all, and the attempts on the part of the other characters to make something happen to Murphy. Murphy lives by the principle of least activity; his greatest ambition is to tie himself to his beloved teakwood rocker and rock himself into a state of blissful nonbeing, a retreat in which the body is vacated in order to free the mind for endless roamings in the actual and virtual. Taking his cue from Belaqua, the Dantean figure punished in...
[The entire page is 1812 words long]
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