Company

Company is a short experimental novella by Samuel Beckett. Rather than following a conventional narrative, it unfolds as a sustained meditation on consciousness, memory, and the need for companionship, structured around three intertwined elements: a disembodied voice, a silent listener, and an unnamed figure who devises the entire situation.

The work opens with the imperative "Imagine." A voice speaks in the dark to a figure lying on his back. The figure, referred to only as "he," can verify very little of what the voice tells him: He can confirm he is on his back in the dark because he feels the pressure on his body and notices how the darkness changes when he opens and closes his eyes, but he cannot verify the voice's claims about his past. The voice addresses its listener as "you," while a third-person narration describes the listener as "he." The listener cannot speak, so no first person exists. A third figure is introduced almost immediately: someone "in another dark or in the same" who devises the entire situation for the sake of company (1). These three layers form the work's architecture, and each is examined, questioned, and revised as the text proceeds. The hearer wonders whether the voice truly addresses him or whether he is overhearing a communication meant for someone else who shares the dark. This uncertainty constitutes a faint form of mental activity, which the voice requires to function as company.

The voice begins recounting episodes from a life that may or may not be the hearer's own. In the first memory, a small boy comes out of Connolly's Stores holding his mother's hand and walks up a steep road toward home on a warm summer afternoon. He asks his mother whether the sky is not much more distant than it appears. Receiving no answer, he rephrases the question, and for reasons he never fathoms, this angers her; she shakes off his hand and delivers a cutting retort he never forgets. The voice then describes the day of the hearer's birth, when his father leaves for a walk in the mountains, motivated by his love of walking and his aversion to the pains of childbirth. Returning at nightfall to learn labor is still ongoing, the father retreats to the coachhouse to sit in his car in the dark until the maid comes to tell him it is over. In a separate episode, the hearer appears as an old man plodding along a narrow country road, counting his footfalls and computing the total in miles and leagues, his father's shade walking at his elbow.

The narration catalogues the voice's traits: It shifts position and volume within a single sentence, falls into long silences that kindle hope it has ceased, and repeats the same memories with minor variations, as if trying to compel the hearer to claim them and confess, "Yes I remember" (20). It maintains a flat tone for all statements, questions, and commands alike. Brief memory fragments follow: the boy on a high diving board while his father calls up from the water below; an old beggar woman at a garden gate whom the boy helps; the boy climbing a great fir tree and throwing himself off, the boughs breaking his fall. A faint light accompanies the voice, lightening the dark when it sounds and deepening when it ebbs. The narration speculates on whether the hearer might move or speak; if he were to murmur words of recognition, what an addition to company that would be.

The deviser figure receives sustained attention. The longer one considers the proposition that someone devises it all for company, the more obscure it becomes, until the mind closes "as the window might close of a dark empty room" (23). The voice places the hearer on the Ballyogan Road, counting steps, with foothills to the left and his father's shade to the right. Questions about the deviser's identity spiral into a regress that arrives at the "unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him" (25). In another memory, the boy slips away at dawn to a hillside nook and strains his eyes across the sea to discern a high mountain 70 miles away; derided by others who said he had seen only cloud, he hoards the vision in his heart. The deviser speaks of himself as of another, acknowledging that confusion itself is company, up to a point, "Till the heart starts to sicken" (27).

The narration considers improving the hearer with some trace of emotion or speech, but physically he must lie inert except for his eyelids. The voice recounts a childhood episode in which the hearer takes pity on a hedgehog, places it in an old hatbox with worms, and sets the box in a disused hutch. The glow from this good deed lasts unusually long, but uneasiness soon replaces it. Days or weeks pass before the boy can return to the hutch. He has never forgotten what he found: "The mush. The stench" (34). The narration considers naming the hearer H so he would know himself addressed but rejects the idea: "The hearer. Unnamable. You" (36).

An attempt to imagine the hearer's space suggests a hemispherical chamber, but reason undermines the deduction, and the narration chides itself: "What kind of imagination is this so reason-ridden?" (38). The voice recalls the last time the hearer went out: snow lay on the ground, and he halted repeatedly, not from tiredness but from speechless misgiving. Lying in the dark, he sees what he could not see at the time: his trail in the snow reveals a great swerve, "Almost as if all at once the heart too heavy" (45). In a longer memory from adulthood, the hearer sits in a small rustic summerhouse where his father once retreated on summer Sundays. Now he waits for a woman who is late. When she arrives, her lips do not return his smile; her body seems larger than he remembers, and he wonders if she is with child.

Wearied by imagining, the deviser ceases, and all ceases, until the need for company revives. He names the hearer M and himself W, but even these names must be relinquished: W too is a figment. The deviser is set crawling on all fours in "bourneless dark" (62), counting half-foot by half-foot. The voice settles to a constant faint murmur above the hearer's face, likened to a mother stooping over a cradle. In a quiet memory, the hearer lies beneath an aspen tree while a woman murmurs, "Listen to the leaves" (59–60). The hearer's senses are surveyed for potential sources of company, but sight, taste, touch, and smell prove dulled or insufficient. A sixth sense, pure reason, God's love: Each is raised and rejected.

The deviser concludes he cannot create while crawling and considers giving up entirely, but the craving for company revives. The voice recounts the hearer's final passage into stillness. When he can go out no more, he sits huddled in a windowless place, having covered roughly three times the earth's circumference yet never once exceeding a radius of one from home. For long years his father's shade walks at his elbow; then for long years he walks alone. Huddled in the dark, he imagines he is not alone while knowing nothing has made this possible. He never murmurs "I" or "we," the first-person pronoun having never entered his vocabulary. Over time, supineness becomes habitual and finally the rule: He will not rise again. With face upturned for good, he labors in vain at his fable, hearing how words are coming to an end: "With every inane word a little nearer to the last" (81). The fable approaches its close: "The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark" (81–82). The work concludes that silence is better than this labor lost, and the hearer is as he always was: "Alone" (82).