Beckett’s The Unnamable presents itself as the limit‐case of narrative fiction and as an experiment in what remains of subjectivity when every conventional support of the novel—plot, character, world, and even a stable first person—is progressively dissolved. It pursues, with almost pedantic consistency, the question of whether there can be a self at all once one admits that all available materials for speaking of it come from anonymous voices, externally imposed stories, and inherited words whose meaning escapes the speaker. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it converts this problem into a method: it stages an interminable monologue in which hypotheses about “I,” “here,” and “they” are proposed, tested, annulled, and replaced by new fictions that in turn collapse, such that the text becomes the record of a subject that exists only as this ongoing failure of self-definition.
The outer framing of the work is extraordinarily austere. A brief paratext notes that this is The Unnamable, translated from the French by the author, and issued alongside Murphy, Molloy and Malone Dies as part of a recognizable corpus. Yet inside the work, any ordinary frame—time, place, body—is immediately placed in suspension. The opening questions, “Where now? Who now? When now?” introduce the three coordinates that a narrative normally presupposes and suspend them at once; the voice admits that it “seem[s] to speak” but insists that this speaking is not its own and that, strictly speaking, it is neither speaking about itself nor about anything it can certify. This is the first decisive gesture of the book’s method: it frames the monologue as an obligation (“I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent.”) and at the same time describes this obligation as structurally impossible to fulfill, since it requires the speaker to speak of things of which he “cannot speak,” including the “I” that would be the subject of this speech. The narrative is therefore conceived as a process governed by a contradiction: the impossibility of speaking and the impossibility of being silent.
From the beginning the voice reflects on its own method. It wonders whether it should proceed “by aporia pure and simple” or through a series of affirmations and negations invalidated as soon as they are uttered, and it confesses that it uses the term aporia without knowing what it means. This confession is more than a moment of humour; it indicates that the entire enterprise depends on the use of terms whose conceptual content the speaker does not master. The same holds for the later invocation of a “spirit of system,” which the voice declares dangerous, and the “spirit of method,” to which it believes itself perhaps too addicted. The method that emerges is an anti-method in classical terms: instead of constructing a deductive order, the text advances by incessant hypothetical constructions and immediate dismantlings. Each time the voice proposes a configuration—of place, of self, of other figures, of temporal sequence—it does so in order to test its capacity to hold together under the pressure of the obligation to speak. The collapse of each configuration is not a mere negative gesture but the very content of the narrative.
The most general form of the problem is formulated when the voice declares that in its “life” there were three things: the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude. These three elements are not presented as states that occur successively; they are the constant conditions under which the monologue takes place. The voice cannot speak because every time it tries to say “I” and “here” it discovers that the materials at its disposal belong to others: words taught long ago as part of lessons, stories about figures like Basil, Mahood and Worm, and the very narrative forms of earlier Beckettian characters such as Murphy, Molloy and Malone. It cannot be silent because some voice, which it alternately calls “the voice” and “my voice,” continues to speak through it even when it has exhausted its strength and falls into intervals of what it calls silence, intervals that prove to be merely pauses in the same speech. It is alone because “no voice” can reach it from outside, and yet this solitude is paradoxically crowded with figures and voices that it simultaneously posits and denies.
A first major configuration arises around the relation to the earlier novels. The voice states that “all these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me”; they have made it “waste [its] time,” suffer “for nothing,” and speak of them when, in order to put an end to speaking, it should have spoken only of itself. That sentence already condenses a complex sequence: those named figures are said to be “sufferers of my pains,” recipients of a portion of the speaker’s own pain that it believed it could externalize in order to observe from a distance. Later the voice demands that they be gone, that they return the pains it lent them, and vanish from its life, memory and terrors, so that only “I and this black void” remain. In this way, The Unnamable retrospectively absorbs the preceding works into the economy of a single voice that now claims authorship of their protagonists as “creatures” invented to avoid speaking of itself. The trilogy is thereby reframed as a gradual approach to the core problem of self-speaking: earlier novels present figures situated in a more or less determinate world; the final novel withdraws these figures and shows that they were always functions of a deeper, more anonymous monologue.
However, the attempt to dismiss those figures is itself articulated as a narrative event. The voice explains that it used them “to speak, since I had to speak, without speaking of me,” and that it believed it was free to say “any old thing” so long as it did not fall silent. The recognition that this “any old thing” might in fact have been precisely what was demanded of it introduces a new layer of complication: even the most arbitrary narrative inventions may have served an obligation the speaker does not understand. In this way, the method of the book undercuts any sharp distinction between “mere fiction” and “truth about me”: every story about Murphy or Mahood may be simultaneously a diversion and an indirect attempt to satisfy the unknown demand of the master.
The figure of the master, in turn, emerges gradually. At first the voice speaks of “they,” a plurality of agents who clothe it, give it money, demand stories, teach it lessons, and send messengers to a distant authority who decides whether it should continue or stop. The book imagines a “college of tyrants” in perpetual conclave, listening intermittently to the monologue, taking meals, playing cards, and occasionally submitting a verbatim report to the master, who alone knows the words that “count.” The voice speculates that it has a pensum to perform, distinct from a “lesson”: the pensum would be a preliminary task imposed perhaps at birth, perhaps as punishment for being born, the content of which the speaker has forgotten; the lesson would remain to be said even after the pensum is completed. This apparatus of invisible authority gives a quasi-juridical form to the obligation to speak: the monologue becomes an indefinite exercise assigned by an unknown power, with no guarantee that fulfillment is even possible.
At the same time, the voice repeatedly undermines the reality of this apparatus. It admits that perhaps the pensum and the lesson are one and the same, and that the demand may simply be an obligation to speak at all, interpreted naïvely as an obligation to say something “about me.” It considers other possibilities: perhaps what is required is praise of the master, perhaps an admission that the speaker is in fact Mahood and that all the stories of a being whose identity Mahood usurps are lies from beginning to end, perhaps something altogether different. Every attempt to specify the task leads to new questions that the voice cannot suppress despite its resolutions. The “spirit of method” that it accuses itself of indulging appears here as the tendency to transform the raw fact of being compelled to speak into a rational system of obligations, rewards and punishments. The text exposes this tendency as itself one of the fictions that prevent the speaker from reaching silence.
The first large-scale experiment in self-definition is the Mahood sequence. Mahood appears as a truncated figure, often imagined in a jar, situated on a street near a chop-house and a slaughterhouse, immobilized and yet a node in a world of cattle lowing, butchers shouting, dishes and prices being recited, and a sky that the voice describes as “like a slate-pencil.” Mahood’s existence is heavily mediated by “they”: he is exposed, displayed, moved from place to place, and above all subjected to an endless regimen of schooling. The monologue recalls the classroom where “pupil Mahood,” already with a white beard, sits among children and is required twenty-five thousand times to repeat a definition of “mammal” and to recite the sentence “Man is a higher mammal.” This comically obsessive scene shows how the subject is constituted through rote formulas and rudimentary classification, formulas that remain lodged in memory and resurface in the monologue as fragments of an alien discourse. Mahood’s identity appears as something imposed through lessons, external descriptions, and narratives about his misfortunes that the voice has grown to despise as “fatuous misfortunes, idiotic pains” when compared to its “true situation.”
At a certain point the voice declares that “the stories of Mahood are ended,” that Mahood has realized the stories could not concern the speaker, and that therefore Mahood is abandoned and the speaker “wins,” having tried so hard to lose in order to please Mahood and be left in peace. The logic here is intricate: Mahood is both a fictional surrogate and a figure of the authority that demands stories (“it is his voice which has often, always, mingled with mine”), so that to abandon Mahood is both to reject a false self and to attempt to evade the compulsion to speak. Yet the very sentence in which this victory is announced acknowledges that it is illusory: the monologue continues; the suppositions are “probably erroneous”; the voice expects to be launched again, equipped with “better arms,” against the “fortress of mortality.” Mahood’s displacement therefore marks a transition in the experiment: from a self explained as a mutilated person in a social world to a more radical abstraction.
That abstraction is Worm. The voice decides that “nothing [is] doing without proper names” and baptizes a solitary figure “Worm,” noting that the name is displeasing but will eventually be the speaker’s own when the time comes. Worm is conceived as the first of his kind; before him there were others like Mahood, “armed with the same prong,” but Worm belongs to a different regime. He is defined initially by privation: he has no voice, no reason, no knowledge, no desire; he merely is. The text imagines him in absolute isolation, in a kingdom “unknown,” without wood, stone, vegetables or minerals, without even a face capable of reflecting the “joy of living and succedanea.” The world of Worm is explicitly opposed to the picaresque world that still clung to Mahood; here the attempt is to think a subject reduced to pure exposure to a sound that, once it begins, will never stop.
Yet even this minimal configuration is immediately entangled in the machinery of “they” and the master. The voice describes how Worm, initially feeling nothing and knowing nothing, will one day “hear the sound that will never stop,” be delivered over to affliction and the struggle to withstand it, and be subjected to a programme of torment designed according to the master’s instruction: “Do this, do that, you’ll see him squirm, you’ll hear him weep.” Silence once broken, the book states, will never be whole again. Worm’s “case” therefore illustrates the irreversible character of articulation: once a voice addresses a being, that being is from then on defined by listening, even if nothing further is ever heard. The voice generalizes this into a principle: “he who has once had to listen will listen always,” regardless of whether future speech is forthcoming. Worm is thus a limit-figure for the unnamable: an attempt to imagine the subject as pure listening devoid of content, which only serves to show that such purity is impossible within language.
Between Mahood and Worm the monologue develops a complicated play of identification and disidentification. The voice muses that if it is Mahood, it is Worm too, or will be Worm when it ceases to be Mahood; it considers whether the failure to be one is due to the other, so that they are accomplices. It even entertains the possibility that a third term, the “tertitus gaudens,” namely itself, is responsible for the double failure, and that there might exist a “true countenance” bathing in a smile which it feels it will never see. This triangulation of Mahood, Worm and the unnamed “I” underscores the central methodological gesture of the book: to multiply hypothetical selves in order to test the limits of identification, while holding back from ever affirming one as definitive.
Throughout these shifts the problem of “place” remains unsolved. The voice often speaks as if it were in a pit, or in a jar, or in an enormous prison “like a hundred thousand cathedrals,” somewhere deep below a surface where men “come and go,” while it dreams of them. At other moments it entertains the notion that the place where it has “always been” is merely the inside of a distant skull, traversed earlier and now fixed, or that its surroundings are simply “black” and “empty,” with nothing but itself. Each time it tries to settle the matter—for instance, by decreeing that there are no days “here,” even though it continues to use the expression “one of these days”—the text reveals another inconsistency: if there are no days, why does one speak of “one of these days”; if there is only blackness, where do the intermittent lights come from that suggest distance? The refusal of a stable topography is not an arbitrary gesture of obscurity; it is the necessary consequence of a situation defined by the conflict between the obligation to specify (“Where now?”) and the impossibility of grounding such specification in experience.
Time undergoes a similar reduction. At one passage the voice describes time not as a flowing continuum but as a series of isolated seconds that “arrive” and “bang into you,” bouncing off and falling inert. Some people, it remarks, add these seconds together to make a life; the speaker cannot do so, since each second presents itself as the first or the third, without continuity. Elsewhere it presents its time as an accumulation surrounding it “on all sides,” the time of the dead and yet unborn piling up “grain by grain,” burying it neither dead nor alive. These images show a time that does not “pass” but immobilizes; the monologue itself is what registers this immobilization through a chronicle of repeated attempts to start again, to “begin again,” and to find some issue that would lead either to an end of speech or to a different mode of being.
Against this background the central methodological decision of the text becomes clear: every time the voice approaches a minimal formulation of “me” and “here,” it immediately recognizes that what it says has been said already, since it has “always been here,” and that therefore it is in danger of once again “putting an end” to both the subject and the place by speaking of them. There is a continuous oscillation between the hope of finally reaching a statement that would “dispose of me” and allow silence, and the fear that such a statement would merely trigger a new cycle of annihilation and recommencement elsewhere. The text describes with particular clarity the pattern of voices that come and go: one voice speaks about “you,” then a second, then a third, then all three together, and then they depart “one by one,” while the voice continues, and the realization sets in that there was never anyone but “you” talking to yourself about yourself. This recursive pattern is perhaps the most precise image of the unnamable: a subject constituted as the residual point where every external voice, once withdrawn, leaves behind a trace that takes itself for an “I.”
Because the monologue is itself the material of the book, the language of the text has to carry the weight of this entire problematic. The speaker remarks at one point that “it all boils down to a question of words,” and elsewhere inventories the limited palette of words and phrases given by earlier instruction and by the masters, words that “keep coming back” and are needed in order “to be able to go on.” At the same time it fantasizes about reducing expression to a small set of tried and trusty words, or even to pure interjections and gurgles—“bing bang,” “ugh,” “pooh,” “oooh,” “aaah”—that would be invented and improvised as it “groans along,” ending in a chuckle and a “few gurgles on the silence.” The text thereby exhibits an extreme tension between discursive reflection on language and the desire for a pre- or infra-linguistic expression. Yet even this imaginary end in pure sound is spelled out in articulate prose; the novel cannot escape the very medium whose exhaustion it anticipates.
Within this linguistic field the famous triad—“the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude”—encapsulates what the voice calls its “life,” while immediately confessing that it has no opinion on whether it ever lived. The triad is not an abstract formula; the book offers detailed phenomenologies of each element. The inability to speak appears in the repeated admission: “I don’t know what I’m saying,” “I don’t know who is speaking,” “I don’t know who I am,” always linked to a simultaneous awareness that speech continues. The inability to be silent appears in the accounts of “little silences” where the voices stop for a moment, hoping to force the speaker to break the silence out of horror, and in the description of silences as “pitfalls” rather than reliefs, gulfs into which the voice would gladly fall if it could. Solitude appears in the recurrent insistence that no external voice can reach the speaker in the place where it is, coupled with the admission that every voice heard must therefore be its own, even when it attributes them to devils, masters or others.
All this culminates in the closing movement. After the departure of the figures and the removal of “things” and “nature,” the voice states that there was never anyone, anyone but itself, and nothing but itself, “talking to me of me.” It insists that it is impossible to stop and impossible to go on, and yet adds a necessity: “I must go on,” followed by the decision “I’ll go on,” and then immediately complicates this resolve with an equation of going on and stopping, of ending and continuing. The celebrated formulation does not function as a heroic affirmation of perseverance; it is the precise articulation of the structure the book has displayed from the outset: the subject as the site where two impossibilities—of speech and of silence—are bound together in a single compulsion without horizon. The last pages linger on the ambiguity of silence: whenever the voice falters or stops for a “good few moments,” the text imagines that there must be murmurs and someone listening, even without ear or mouth, so that silence itself is haunted by the possibility of renewed speech.
In this light, the composition sequence and outer framing gain a distinct conceptual contour. The trilogy moves from Molloy’s still recognizably novelistic structure of journeys and episodes, through Malone Dies, which already reduces narrative to the act of telling from a sickbed, to The Unnamable, which places the entire burden on a single immobile voice in an indeterminate space. Within the pages of The Unnamable this movement is rehearsed and cancelled: Murphy, Molloy and Malone are invoked only to be stripped of reality and reabsorbed into the speaking “I” that now claims their pains as its own. The English text’s status as a translation by the author of his own French original further intensifies the sense that the voice is always already repeating itself in another medium; language appears as something neither simply given nor simply mastered but as a set of materials that can be reconfigured while remaining fundamentally the same obligation.
Taken as a whole, The Unnamable can be read as a rigorous phenomenology of a subject that exists only as an effort to relate to its own speech. Its scholarly stake lies in the way it identifies narrative less with the representation of events than with the continuous negotiation of an obligation to speak in the absence of any stable referent. The book elaborates a method in which every attempt to fix “I,” “here,” and “they” is treated as a provisional construction to be dismantled, so that the work itself becomes a record of successive failures of self-definition. In doing so it neither abandons the novel to pure incoherence nor restores it to a secure order; it maintains instead an unstable equilibrium where fiction is continually exposed as fiction and yet remains the only available mode of articulating the situation. The closing resolve to “go on” expresses this equilibrium: it names a necessity that is indistinguishable from the impossibility it confronts, and in that sense it clarifies what the book has all along investigated—the enduring restlessness of a voice that cannot be assigned a name and yet cannot cease to attempt to say what it is.
Simon Gros 
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