There is no literary parallel for [Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable,] the three books in which Samuel Beckett, releasing a certain violence of temperament evident in his earliest works and suppressed in Murphy and Watt, turned his face away from every accessible satisfaction, even from the familiar contours of his own language, and jettisoning the very matrices of fiction—narrator, setting, characters, theme, plot—devoted his scrutiny … to the very heart of novel writing: a man in a room writing things out of his head while every breath he draws brings death nearer.

From that everything flows, including the bedridden Malone's frequent proposal to enumerate his possessions, like a senescent Crusoe. Reminiscence, fantasy, description, reflection, all the paraphernalia of fiction pass through these books with the disarming obviousness of the unexpected. The narrator constantly shifts his focus of attention in order to keep himself interested. That is what the professional fictionist does too, though he would claim if pressed that he did it in order to keep the reader interested. Yet from no one is a reader more remote than from a novelist; the sheer labor of covering pages fills up his working days. (p. 62)

The trilogy is, among other things, a compendious abstract of all the novels that have ever been written, reduced to their most general terms.

And not only novels; for the trilogy also manages a sardonic counterpoint to the epic tradition of the West, which proved to be mortal, and indeed came to an end (unless we are going to take Paradise Lost for a new beginning) at about the time the novel was invented. That tradition started with Homer, who if he had been a twentieth-century Irishman living in Paris, might well have written the first half of Molloy instead of what he did write, if it was he who wrote it at all.

What Molloy is writing, sitting up in bed, is perhaps a faithful narrative, or perhaps he is making it up. At any rate, it purports to deal with his journey to that room. He set out, it seems, on a bicycle, intending to visit his mother (also bed-ridden); and he has executed a huge sweep, more or less circular, through the to him known world, in the course of which he has lost the bicycle, the use of his legs, the toes on one foot, everything indeed but his crutches and the will to proceed. There has been a Calypso, named Lousse, in whose house he stayed some months after an acquaintance founded on running his bicycle over her dog. There has been a Cyclopean police sergeant, who threatened him with a cylindrical ruler, and before whom our wanderer altered his fortunes by proclaiming his own name. ("My name is Molloy, I cried, all of a sudden, now I remember.") There have been ramparts, and seaboard privations. He had just reached the point when it was impractical to drag himself further on his stomach, and was considering rolling, when help mysteriously arrived.

The narrative is now assumed by a certain Moran. He also is writing, and his story follows Molloy's about as faithfully as Virgil's followed Homer's. Like Virgil, he also imparts a notably administrative tone, being (unlike Molloy, or Homer) a citizen of a substantial community. ("I have a huge bunch of keys, it weighs over a pound. Not a door, not a drawer in my house but the key to it goes with me, wherever I go.") He is writing the narrative of a journey, by bicycle and on foot, accompanied by his son, which was meant to be a search for Molloy, but which in fact brought him back to his own house, minus son and bicycle, crippled, stripped, discredited, and barely distinguishable from his quarry.

So much for the Odyssey and Aeneid of this new graph of civilization. We next encounter its Divine Comedy, which revolves about another man in bed. He is called Malone, at least that is what he is called now, though there are signs that he is a new phase of Molloy, or perhaps of Molloy and Moran together (unless a Molloy is simply what a Moran turns into when he goes looking for a Molloy). Malone too is writing, with a stub of a pencil in an exercise book. What he is writing is an account of his final weeks on earth, and also, by fits and starts, a piece of fiction, to distract himself from speculation about his mysterious surroundings. His narrative concerns a certain Sapo, who midway changes his name to Macmann, ends up in an institution not unlike that in which Malone appears to be confined, and expires at the same moment as his creator.

If The Unnamable, in turn, were Malone dead it would not be surprising. He is seated in a gray space, menaced by mysterious lights, and frantically writing, he is not clear how or with what. He can hardly be Malone, however, since Malone periodically executes an orbit about him. Indeed, he is convinced that all the previous characters are in this place with him, in fact that he invented them and the whole "ponderous chronicle of moribunds in their courses, moving, clashing, writhing or fallen in short-lived swoons." (Were Molloy and Moran, for that matter, fictions of Malone's? Ulysses, it is true, appears in the Divine Comedy, and so do Virgil and Homer.) His problem, at the end of this counter-epic series, is to disappear, to cease from being and from troubling, a problem he will be powerless to resolve until he has given satisfactory evidence that he exists in the first place. This is difficult, since he is neither a kind of Virgil, nor of Homer, nor of Dante, but more or less a kind of Descartes (who Boileau asserted had cut the throat of poetry). Nevertheless he too tells sketchy stories, for instance about a certain Mahood who on one leg and crutches executed a world-wide spiraling Odyssey, and on another occasion was confined night and day outside a restaurant in a jar to which the menu was affixed, but despite his efforts to attract attention stayed apparently invisible to everyone but the proprietress. There is an important difference between these stories and Malone's, however, for it is not at all clear whether The Unnamable is inventing Mahood, or whether Mahood is partly responsible for inventing The Unnamable, having told the latter these stories about himself as part of the conspiracy to make him believe he exists. He is locked up with his fictions, at the mercy of an inchoate "they" who have supplied him with the very language he struggles with (yet which of us has made his own language?), and "they" are still perhaps fictions of his, or he of theirs.

Homer, Virgil, Dante, Descartes: these are not continents on a map Beckett has been following: Rorschach configurations, rather, which his groupings of tension and emphasis encourage us to see. They appear because his concentric narratives and serial narrators, each in turn more densely conscious of having had the experience of all the previous ones, succeed one another in the same manner as the major efforts of the Western imagination, each master in turn more burdened by responsibility for the preceding ones, as in Mr. Eliot's vision of The Mind of Europe. That is why outlines seem to grow clearer and purposes firmer as we work backward: Chaucer was not troubled by reading Hamlet, nor Homer by the cosmology of Mount Purgatory. It was the mind of Europe before the mind of Beckett that turned literature toward a more and more intricate self-consciousness, confronting a Joyce or a Proust with an intellectual landscape whose most mysterious feature is himself performing the act of writing. Beckett may be absolved of responsibility for turning even the novel in upon itself. Flaubert's first achieved fiction was a serious and powerful novel about a woman who has become what she is by reading novels.

The plays deal more openly with the past. Waiting for Godot reflects in its dusty but accurate mirror the Noh drama (tree, journey, concatenated rituals), Greek theater (two actors, messengers, expectation of a deus ex machina), and commedia dell' arte (unflagging improvisation round a theme), while Endgame beats its bleak light on Shakespeare's stage, dominated by a prince of players named Hamm. Novels and plays alike recapitulate the past of their art, so sparely that if we stare at a parallel it vanishes, so casually that if we ask Beckett the meaning of all this incumbent tradition he can cry with Dan Rooney, "It is a thing I carry about with me!" Yet its presence contributes to the powerful sense—irradiating his inert material—that he has gotten at the form's central sources of energy, and looks into a long tradition with X-ray eyes.

So he propels the trilogy's extraordinary reductio for some 180,000 words, incorporating as he goes by the roman policier, the picaresque chronicle, the Bildungsroman, the universes of Proust and Defoe (these two superimposed), the fiction of self-interrogation. Our attention is held without a plot (a broom that sweeps everything in the same direction), without an undertow of ideas, with a minimum of incident, with no incubus of profundity. What holds us is in part the unquenchable lust to know what will happen in the next ten words, in part the hypnotic fascination of the nearly motionless (flies on a windowpane). Yet he has so distilled these appeals that they operate with uncomfortable immediacy; we are not allowed to suppose that we are reading "for the story," or for some improving purpose. His transparent syntax establishes a tone, a tone of genial resignation, within which the events of the trilogy declare themselves; and these events are small items become momentous, a minute shift of attention, the toot of a bicycle horn, the whereabouts of a boot. For Beckett, manipulating a form that has always indulged itself in copious triviality, has invented for it a convention that can accommodate any amount of detail while rendering nothing too trivial to be interesting. (pp. 63-8)