Beckett's trilogy [Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] is for all its apparent formlessness a close-knit structural unit, though the novels are related to each other more through their form and direction than through any obvious system of interrelated characters or events. All of them are narrated in the first person. Each of them deals with a figure or figures whose condition is purged of the specific, that is, of those qualities which would detract from his universality or from his status as a metaphor for some aspect of human experience. The heroes of the trilogy are all artists, all writers and hence creators; yet they all exhibit a disgust for life to be matched only by the tenacity with which they hold on to it. All of them are models of the egocentric, but as the series progresses toward The Unnamable the narrators' worlds tighten and shrink. It is almost as if Beckett were examining layer by layer the mind of the artist and the sources of his inspiration. It follows that the Unnamable speaks from within the cave of the self in the voice of some obscene male sibyl. He spews upon the receptive page a steady stream of heavily-punctuated but almost disembodied thought.

In terms of our own experience this third novel is the monologue of a deaf mute who is at least partially blind and totally incapable of movement. Unfortunately for him, this seemingly hermetic existence is only semi-autonomous…. With his range of choice reduced to an almost absolute minimum, he persists in choosing and speculating. If the Unnamable has a body, he has no senses which would enable him to feel it. Nevertheless, he hears voices which assure him of his physical existence. In response to these he pours his being by turns into idealized creations of his fancy. In the past he has identified with the heroes of Beckett's other novels, Murphy, Watt, Molloy, and Malone; now he becomes or posits [Mahood or Worm]…. On one level of interpretation we see these two suffering creatures as projections of the psyche of a suffering god whom we must identify with the Unnamable himself. They are screens for the essential formlessness of the hero, shapes given to the half-formed doubts and the torment of the nameless and the inarticulate.

In this connection the reader familiar with the earlier novels Murphy and Watt will recall Murphy's favorite patient at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, Mr. Endon, the psychotic whose name and condition suggest his function. Mr. Endon is Murphy's ideal, the perfect closed system, impervious to outside influence. His successor, Watt's employer, the godlike Mr. Knott, is in some ways even more so. Consciously or not, all of Beckett's characters are approaching this state. In the trilogy, Molloy is in quest of the womb, Moran is in quest of the Molloy in himself; the bedridden Malone writes out his days from the shelter of a sort of improvised room-womb. But the Unnamable's position is clearly the zenith. It is characteristic of Beckett's humor that this creature, situated on the brink of nirvana, yearns after the world of objects. In him the extremes meet. Paradise leans close to hell. (pp. 130-31)

Although to Beckett's mind all mankind is in purgatory, each of the books in the trilogy contains ironically presented elements of all three of man's postmortal states. Furthermore, each of the three novels puts the ironic emphasis upon one of these states. Molloy is infernal, Malone Dies is purgatorial, and The Unnamable is paradisal. However, paradox is Beckett's stock in trade, and though The Unnamable as a novel depicts an ostensibly ideal state, the novel's central figure is in purgatory. Embodying as he does both the unmerited punishment of Worm and the equally unmerited rewards of Mahood, he is seen as forming a middle ground between heaven and hell.

In his article "Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce," Beckett defines hell as "the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation. Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements."

Although the preceding passage was designed to explain Joyce's concept of existence, Beckett seems also to be defining his own view. We need not be surprised therefore that at each stage in his heroes' adventures apparent hell and apparent heaven give way to the only reality which man knows, that is, the constant purgatory of existence…. Thus the questing creatures, Beckett's tormented heroes, can, in spite of their apparent progress toward the pure state of bodilessness, do nothing more than accomplish the purgatorial spiral, moving ever inward—toward the immaculate and endless purgatory of The Unnamable. His latest full-length narrative, How It Is, deals finally with hell, portraying a nameless creature crawling endlessly through primeval muck and experiencing grotesquely sadistic pleasures with others of his kind. Figuratively the spiral has begun to unwind. (pp. 132-33)

The most complex of the novels in Beckett's French-Irish trilogy is Molloy, the bicyclical tale of two quest-heroes [Molloy and Moran], active seekers after the nameless joys of salvation. The novel is sharply divided into two first-person narratives of equal length. The two wheels of the bicycle are connected by a messenger and steered by the divine will. (p. 134)

My belief is that Molloy's mother, Molloy, Moran, and Moran's son all inhabit the same body; further, the events described in the two narratives are simultaneous and identical though viewed from different angles and differently ordered. Since the narrators are by their own admission untrustworthy to the point of absurdity, it seems probable that they are actually rationalizing the behavior of a posited third force (Youdi or Jacques Junior?) over whom they have progressively lost their power. It is by virtue of this third force that Molloy and Moran are able to interpenetrate, and their two accounts overlap in predictable but nevertheless striking ways. (pp. 135-36)

[Molloy] has been described as an anti-novel in the tradition of Rabelais, Sterne, and Joyce and indeed we are aware that the form of the conventional novel is being satirized. But the term "anti-novel" is not descriptive. It would be more like Beckett to write an ante-novel and more appropriate to say that all of his books are what Northrop Frye calls Menippean Satires (a variety of sophisticated farce). At any rate in Molloy we are struck by the fact that nothing much is happening. Two vaguely insignificant quest heroes, two suffering clowns are decomposing: the one a noman, the other an everyman. Here is a deliberate reversal of pattern characteristic of Beckett's art. The quest hero is generally conceived of as going into the darkness to retrieve the light and achieve a meaningful existence. In Molloy shabby versions of the shining knight-errant achieve deeper darkness and meaninglessness.

Molloy's two parts are intimately linked, a complementary or an ironic couple contributing to a fascinating portrait of the universal man and an ingenious satire of his aspirations and accomplishments. Hence, it can be shown that every event and object described by Molloy is viewed from a different point of vision by Moran. But these relationships are screened by the paradox implicit in the identification of two such disparate creatures, by the displacement which events undergo in the mind of Molloy which knows neither time nor place and finally by the sublimation or distortion of Molloy-like ideas in the narrative of Moran. In one sense the reader is being willfully misled. Only after a second or third reading do we recognize the affinities beneath the contradictions: realizing, for example, that Molloy's vision of the black sheep and their shepherd at the beginning of his narrative is exactly contemporaneous with Moran's vision of them near the end of his tale, that their different reactions are consistent with their different and complementary roles as representatives of the extremes of chaos and order. (pp. 140-41)

[On the most literal level, Jacques Junior] represents, first, hope in the future, being released energy, youth, and apparent freedom; second, despair, being doomed, as Moran indicates, to continue the cycle or spiral of existences. At any rate we may consider him to be the first term of the series concluding with the Unnamable. It is worth noting that only in terms of this sort of development at once temporal and psychic can we account for Jacques Junior's behavior and existence. The more commonly held belief in the inverted order of the narrative accounts neither for the role of the boy nor for the parallelism of the events, nor for the exact equivalence of the two narratives' lengths, nor for the obviously complementary vision of the two narrators. Furthermore, it implies a somewhat simple-minded gimmickry on the part of Beckett whose irony is more subtle. I would suggest that it should stand as a red-herring solution but that we would gain much by tracing the progression, not through Jacques to Moran to Molloy to Malone to the Unnamable but rather through Jacques to the tandem Molloy-Moran or better still through Jacques/Molloy-Moran.

Beckett, using the simplest of tools, a basic French or English vocabulary, a handful of allusions, some standard humorous devices, succeeds in evoking for each of his characters innumerable identities and for his book an interlace pattern as complex as those in the Irish book of Kells or as the Daedalian labyrinth. (pp. 144-45)

Beckett is applying as a principle and with telling effect the idea that opposites are equal, that extremes meet, and that all existence is "a kitten chasing its tail." This principle is drawn in part at least from the teaching of James Joyce's favorite philosopher-heretic, Giordano Bruno, whose theories Beckett outlines in the following passage from his early Joyce article:

There is no difference, says Bruno between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent…. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations…. And all things are ultimately identified with God, the universal monad, Monad of monads.

Beckett applies this view to every line, every identity, every concept, analogy, character, image, and book of his trilogy. Hence, the cycles within cycles that characterize its structure, the logical and valid contradictions evident everywhere, the improbable identifications. Hence the flux of movement in the brain of Beckett's readers…. Molloy, the Morans (father and son), and Malone are all simply puppets motivated by the static mind of the Unnamable, that symbol of the dubious upper and lower reaches of existence. [The] seemingly endless permutations create the kaleidoscopic effects which are enriched and multiplied by seemingly endless analogical identities, which, like the coincidence of Jacques Junior's name, should, to paraphrase Moran, lead to no confusion.

We find, for example, parallels drawn from Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Bergson; from Freud and Jung; from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and the sacred texts; from myth cycles and literature. Each of these contains along with its grain of truth a large pinch of the burlesque, both of which are complicated when the systems are brought into conjunction. Molloy may be seen as Christ (or one of the thieves), Descartes's mind as distinguished from matter, Bergson's creative imagination welling up from a time-free matrix, Plato's deathless soul, and we may say that these metaphors are at once apt and improper. (pp. 146-48)