After
reading Malone Dies, I was left with thoughts
of a topic that Beckett seems to favor. The topic is death. The first sign that
this novel will include death comes from the title. Malone knows he is going to
die. However, there is still an uncertainty in him about when. “I shall soon be
quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. … Perhaps I am wrong,
perhaps I shall survive Saint John
the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom” (173).
However, death does not seem to scare Malone at all. He handles the matter like
it is an every day occurrence. We later find out that Malone is desensitized
enough from death that he has even murdered people.
I’ve talked
about death before in this blog, but the circumstances of death are a little
different in this novel than they were in “Ding-Dong.” In “Ding-Dong” the
child’s death is an accident. Since it was accidental I can see how some people
may write it off as being inevitable and of little significance to them. However,
in Malone Dies Malone talks about how
he murdered people with no sign of remorse. To me this is a whole new level of
apathy. He seems to have no regard for human life. Perhaps that is why he could
not care less about his own death.
While I am
not looking forward to death, I do know that it is inevitable. Nobody can live
forever, and honestly nobody should live forever. There are many reasons why
immortality would not be a good thing, and here is a comic by one of my
favorite webcomics illustrating one of these reasons.
Very interesting indeed. Although I couldn't help but pondering what kind of death it is that Malone anticipates. While it very well could be the physical death to which you allude, I wonder if it could also be the anticipation of an 'ego death'. I myself have found many connections to Freud and the psychoanalytical process in the narrative. At one point he says, "The volume of sound perceived remained no doubt the same I had simply lost the faculty of decomposing it. The noises of nature, of mankind and even my own..." I wonder if at these noises or 'voices' these three stimuli could stand for the id, ego, and super ego, respectively... based on this understanding, how should we think about the death of Malone?
ReplyDeleteAwesome comic, got a chuckle out of it. I agree that Beckett focuses on death in much of his writing. He doesn't approach the subject in a particularly dramatic or romantic way, but instead appears to be fascinated with the transition into... unconsciousness? The void? Nobody knows, but obviously Beckett struggled to imagine the death experience.
ReplyDeleteMalone and Molloy Dies are focused on the death of their protagonists. Each book begins with the beginning of the death of the main character, the point where these people start their descent (or ascent) into death. They don't have much left to do with their lives but die, and they are incapacitated enough by age that their relationships with people and ability to function (two key components of identity and life as a human being) have almost completely disintegrated.