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Michael Stone

Reading Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy Through My Own Despair

A Review by Michael Stone

Despair is sometimes too much and the despair in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy was too much for me on my first attempt. The Trilogy is an abstracted collection of tales about dying, hopelessness and death itself. I heard about the first book, Molloy, in college, checked it out from the library and made it halfway through. The book is divided in two parts and the first was so bleak I put the book down and returned it unfinished.


My ability to approach pessimism in fiction is circumstantial. I’m sensitive. I was terrified by Animal Farm as a middle schooler and I couldn’t finish Lord of the Flies; I still haven’t picked it up. I was more interested in Watership Down, Gulliver’s Travels and Harry Potter. I discovered Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce in high school and was attracted to the warmth of their worlds.


Beckett, however, prefers bare and uncovered ground. He was a resistance volunteer in WWII and in the aftermath what hope was left? A completely barren world? Why would anyone continue on? Molloy and other characters in the Trilogy partly answer these questions as they spiral alone across blank mindscapes. They don’t experience relationships; they experience sensations. Interactions are boiled down to their most basic movements. Everything in the Trilogy gets as close as possible to absolute zero, culminating in The Unnameable, the final part, in which a character we barely recognize as human monologues on its own confusion. In this dense work we recognize the primal point of departure: an ambiguity that really does make us human.


In lockdown I read the first part of Molloy again and moved through the rest of the Trilogy. The isolation of the real world seemed to hold very little for me. I felt like a Beckett character, a sensation of a person. I was not old but felt old, not alone but felt alone, not decrepit and incapable but feeling this way. Yet even the most destitute Beckett character finds a way to continue. The Unnameable ends with, “…I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” And we will go on.


I read Beckett in a state of flux and found his fiction profoundly helpful. In Beckett the primary force is continuation in the wake of destruction and the unknown that is life. Beckett takes us through despair with no shortcuts. He winks at us and says it’s okay if nothing happens today.


I fell into a place in which Beckett made sense. I don’t see his work as depressing but compassionate. We’re already living in Beckett’s bleak world, but he examines that bleakness, the potential meaninglessness, and shows us that we can continue without denying its difficulties, that we can and must go on, with humor and grit. There is tenderness in his fiction. I had to loosen up, or be shaken up, enough to see it, and that occurred in the silence.



Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.


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