Malone Dies

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett, part of his post-war trilogy alongside Molloy and The Unnamable, takes the form of an extended monologue by a bedridden, elderly narrator who passes his final days writing stories in an exercise-book while awaiting death. The novel moves between Malone's account of his own deteriorating condition and the fictional tales he composes, with the boundaries between narrator and characters steadily eroding.

Malone, an elderly man confined to a bed in a nondescript room, opens by announcing he will soon be dead, perhaps within a month. He resolves to remain "neutral and inert," guarding against fits of passion or impatience (6). To fill his remaining time, he outlines a programme: He will tell himself stories, one about a man and a woman, one about an animal, and one about a thing, probably a stone. Afterward, he will draw up a final inventory of his possessions. He also plans to describe his present condition, though he suspects this is a weakness. Before beginning, he declares that he forgives nobody.

Malone describes his situation in spare, uncertain terms. He does not remember arriving in the room, possibly brought by ambulance, and believes it to be an ordinary private room rather than a hospital or asylum. A bed sits by the window, through which he can see rooftops and sky. Each day, a hand opens the door to leave a dish of soup on a wheeled table and remove the previous day's dish. An old woman once attended to him directly and procured for him a long hooked stick with which he can reach objects throughout the room. Now he sees only a gaunt hand and part of a sleeve. His body is almost entirely immobile, dying, he says, "unbeknown to my stupid flesh" (13).

Malone begins his first story, introducing Saposcat, called Sapo, the eldest child of poor, anxious parents. Sapo is disengaged at school, indifferent to his lessons. His parents conduct repetitive conversations about money and Sapo's future, accomplishing nothing. Malone interrupts himself repeatedly, calling his own story tedious and suspecting he is merely talking about himself in disguise. At 14, Sapo is a plump boy fond of nature but unable to distinguish one bird or tree from another. His one enthusiasm is the hawk's flight. Between passages about Sapo, Malone describes a light going on across the way and the difficulty of moving his own legs.

Malone introduces the Lamberts, a farming family Sapo visits. Big Lambert is a toothless, domineering man renowned locally for slaughtering pigs. His much younger wife is his third or fourth, and they have two children, Edmund and Lizzy. Sapo sits by the window in the Lamberts' dark, earth-floored kitchen while the family works. Mrs. Lambert periodically flings up her arms in anguished gestures before falling silent. She borrows lentils and begins sorting them, then sweeps the heaps together and dumps them unsorted into a saucepan. After a family supper, an atmosphere of incestuous desire hovers over the household. At night, Mrs. Lambert sits alone, clinging to the worn kitchen table, her mind a "press of formless questions" (46). Eventually Lizzy reports to her mother that Sapo told her he is going away and will not come back.

Malone declares "Mortal tedium" (47) and digresses into memories, including a former acquaintance named Jackson who tried to teach his parrot the Latin phrase nihil in intellectu. Malone reflects on the strange light in his room, a leaden grey that seems to come from all directions, and wonders whether he might already be dead. His pencil slips from his fingers, and he spends 48 hours recovering it, during which he experiences a vision of dissolution: two heaps of sand, himself and "the other," crumbling into what he calls "the blessedness of absence" (52). He describes the recurring sensation of an unseen hand "delving feebly in my particles" (54) and reflects that he is like "an old foetus" (55), never truly born and therefore never truly to die.

When Malone returns to his story, he can no longer tolerate the name Saposcat and renames his character Macmann. The figure now sits on a bench in a city, dressed in an enormous green greatcoat and a hard domed hat too small for his head. Caught in rain, Macmann lies prostrate on the ground, brooding on guilt and punishment, feeling that living itself is insufficient atonement for some unnamed sin. Malone digresses on Macmann's inability to hold employment, pulling up carrots instead of weeds and making streets dirtier when hired to clean them. Malone then turns to his inventory of possessions: two pencils, his exercise-book, the stick, a brimless hat, a photograph of a donkey, one yellow boot, and a blood-stained club. He notes his soup has stopped arriving. He conceives the idea of using his stick to push his bed across the room, but the stick slips and falls out of reach, a catastrophic loss.

Macmann wakes in an asylum called the House of Saint John of God. His keeper is Moll, a small, very old woman who wears long ivory crucifixes as earrings. When Macmann demands his old hat, Moll teases him by claiming his things were thrown away, then reassures him they are safely stored and retrieves it. A physical intimacy develops between them despite their age, achieved through "the skin, the mucus and the imagination" (92). Moll writes Macmann rambling love letters, and he composes short rhymes exalting love as "a kind of lethal glue" (95). Moll begins to deteriorate: her hair falls out, she vomits frequently, and she withdraws from Macmann's advances. One morning a man named Lemuel informs Macmann that Moll is dead and announces he is now in charge. Lemuel is slightly more stupid than malevolent, prone to striking himself with a hammer to alleviate his mental anguish.

Malone reports being struck on the head by a mysterious visitor in a black suit with brown boots caked in mud, who stays for hours watching him in silence and departs whistling. Malone, whose voice has gone dead, composes a list of questions to show the visitor if he returns. He predicts that with his death "it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave" (66). He senses he is being "given birth to into death" (117) and announces "I shall say I no more" (117), signaling his intention to remain within Macmann's story.

Under Lemuel's care, Macmann walks the institution's windswept grounds, enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass, searching for a way out but finding none. A philanthropist named Lady Pedal organizes an excursion to the islands. Lemuel assembles his five charges, tethered in pairs, into a waggonette and then a boat. On a small rocky islet, Lady Pedal departs with one of two sailors to arrange a picnic. Lemuel releases Macmann, then kills both sailors with a hatchet. Lady Pedal returns, sees the bodies, and faints. After sunset, Lemuel loads the inmates into the boat and rows into the bay.

The final passage describes the group as "a tangle of grey bodies" (121) huddled in darkness. Lemuel ships his oars, which trail in the water. Malone notes that Macmann, "my last" (122), is there too, perhaps sleeping. Lemuel raises his blood-stained hatchet but not to strike anyone. The prose breaks into fragments and repetitions. References to Lemuel's weapons blur into references to a pencil and stick, collapsing the distinction between character and narrator. The text dissolves into isolated negatives: "never," "never anything," "there," "any more" (122). The novel ends mid-disintegration, Malone's voice and Macmann's story dissolving together.