It is easy to believe, if you tell yourself so, that Malone is simply Molloy from the preceding novel. This seems to make sense, given that both find themselves in drab rooms, waiting for--and welcoming--their own deaths while in some way chronicling the summation of their lives.
However, it seems odd that Beckett would choose to write two parts of a trilogy about the same character doing, essentially, the same thing. It is possible, but let us assume it is not firmly so.
In fact, let us save time and assume that nothing is firmly so. This assumption must be extended to the characters, ideas, and the narrator himself. Beckett appears to explain this concept himself in Malone Dies when he states: "The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks release from its formlessness." What then, if one of the forms that the unchanging has chosen for its formlessness is Malone himself? It seems entirely possible. This means that Malone could have been anyone; could still be anyone.
Let us explore our options.
Nor does he seek anything with quite the ferocity that basketball legend Karl Malone sought an NBA championship late in his career; seemingly knowing that the attainment of just one thing would satisfy him for life.
Our Malone certainly resembles the latter more closely than the former, as neither ever attain the thing which they thought would bring meaning to their lives. However, with out Malone, he never goes so far as to even identify such a thing. Accepting instead that the thing may be nothingness itself.
And so, we return to nothing, as so often we do with Beckett. No legends of over-acting or failed professional athletes to console us. Only the bitter dark and cold of reality to remind us we are alive. Only our own formation of nothingness to inform us.
I think, though, if there is one thing that can be agreed upon in Malone Dies, it is that our Malone is not famed rapper Glasses Malone.
Hilarious references aside, do you think that Malone truly lacks an identity, or that he simply cannot conclude anything for certain about the one he has? In the novel, he mentions being unable to conclude anything quite often, even something as mundane as the exact floor he's on. The fact that his grasping stick can only reach so far seems symbolic of this, but there's also a wariness about what more effort will bring him--that he cannot trust the conclusions towards which his playing points. Or is his reluctance to conclude revealing of a portion of his identity in itself?
ReplyDeleteFrom the statement that "the forms are many in which the unchanging seeks release from its formlessness" (great quotation, by the way), I conclude that Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, and the Unnamable are all forms inhabited by a formless, unchanging thing.
ReplyDeleteWhat's that thing?
Maybe it's Jung's collective unconsciousness, for which all those M-named (and unnamable) characters are vessels. Never mind what language Beckett composed in (with the ease he slipped between French and English, Beckett himself seemed hardly to care): if you put aside each of the characters' personal details (which Beckett, from book to book, increasingly does), the language in which they're described is (again, increasing with each book in the trilogy), closer to a bare, universal language of the human mind.
Anyway, what should be taken away from this comment is that Malone is indeed Burt Reynolds.