Samuel Beckett

Let me begin with an admission: I didn't follow any of Samuel Beckett's Molloy. Not a word. 

OK, some of it - maybe. But by and large, I was lost. Or I think I was. I found Molloy impenetrable, and the few sections of the novel I did follow were so disjointed, so opaque that I had trouble orienting them within the context of Moran's quest for the book's namesake.  

For me, Molloy remains an enigma: both as a work of art - and as a character. Ultimately, I read Becket's book as a mediation on death. The first half of Molloy represented, for me, the slow slog toward a state of inaction, of palliative decline. Meanwhile, the second half, dominated by Moran's search for Molloy, amounted to a meditation on death itself: here was Beckett evaluating, and re-evaluating, his own mortality, wrapped up as it is with Molloy's. 

"The news was bad," writes Beckett toward the end of the book, "but it might have been worse." Which, I suppose, is true. But this is a pretty bleak novel, and what light does shine through, is couched in uncertainty: as if the conclusions Beckett draws regarding death are themselves subject to study, to evaluation. In this way, Molloy seems to be a book in search of certainty - which is something, ironically, only death can guarantee.