In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very same era in which he produced his celebrated play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett wrote three novels that paint a very absurdist view of human existence. This “trilogy” began with Molloy and then Malone Dies, which had a quirky cast of characters and some peculiar action, but in the capstone novel The Unnamable the narrative is reduced to extremes.

Here our nameless narrator knows only that he exists, and that he exists somewhere, but he finds it impossible to say anything about himself or his settings. That is, this novel is a single long paragraph consisting of the narrator trying, time and time again, to construct arguments point by point that anything definite can be said of him and his surroundings. “What am I to do?” he asks early on. “What shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?” This complex chain of reasonings makes The Unnamable rather challenging reading even by the standards of Beckett or 20th-century modernism, for the reader can never skim or even read with less than his full dedicated attention, otherwise he’ll lose the thread of the argument, and therefore the book's whole “plot”.

There are only two other characters, “Mahood” and “Worm”, but essentially they are mere inventions of the narrator, people who thinks up so that he has something to talk about. He may ascribe to them qualities and actions, but ultimately they turn out to be mere proxies for himself and flights of his fancy, and so again he is unable to say anything definite about the world around him. Why does the narrator even bother? In the earlier novels of this loose trilogy, Beckett gave his narrators a logorrhea, a fear of ever falling silence, for to fall silent would mean death. This quality is preserved here as well, but it too is taken to an extreme. By the last third or so of The Unnamable, the narrator becomes increasingly desperate, his thinking more fractured and repetitive, but he knows that cannot stop his reasonings, otherwise he’ll simply go up in a puff of smoke.

My feelings about this book fluctuated wildly during my reading, making it a challenge to assign a star rating. At times, I was hooked. There is a great deal of humor and pathos in this novel, and Beckett’s turns of phrase can be wildly clever and inventive. If one reads the text out loud in these portions, or at least imagines that it is being declaimed by a masterful actor, it has a wonderful theatrical quality about it just like Beckett's plays. On the other hand, the novel can occasionally feel that it is overlong, that Beckett has made his point already and now the book is slipping into less interesting prose than preceding sections. Still, the book’s status as a classic of 20th-century literary modernism is clear.

maybe it's because this is my 4th/5th Beckett, but I finally felt like I could really keep pace with him, and thus had a really great time reading this collection. so many "wow," *gasp*, hand-to-mouth moments. especially texts for nothing 5-9 (& 13 like that's crazy). "I would know it was not me, I would know I was here, begging in another dark, another silence, for another alm, that of being or of ceasing, better still, before having been." what a crazy thing to say. to be able to say. we really are trapped inside a glass jar... separating us from the world... separating us from our bodies... keeping our souls, our *real* selves, imprisoned somewhere... in a dark, timeless, nowhere. unnamable, unthinkable, unknowable - to the point that most of us will spend our whole lives completely unaware that are "words" (our thoughts, actions, behaviors, visions, dreams, etc.) are failing us, let alone what they're trying to express...that there's something—or someone—else there. but Beckett was lucky in that he had this sensitive sixth sense, although it makes his writing seem like the ramblings of a madman.

“If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.”

Very puzzling. I feel like I would benefit from seeing this performed.

Suppose I put you in a washing machine and set the spinner on for hours- the dizziness you will feel is what I felt while reading the book. This dizziness will makes one question, vaguely that is, the nature of reality, identity and social contact. The unnamed and highly unreliable narrator, who also claims the authorship of previous two works of trilogy and of Murphy too,is thinking about something, or nothing, or something that turned out to be nothing, or something that was always nothing; perhaps everything is nothing, I mean is anything anything? - it doesn't matter, it should matter but it doesn't ..... okay, if you can stand 200 pages of this, you will love it. You might think you have seen worst of Beckett in Molloy and Malone dies - but you will be wrong, whatever he smoked, he was very particularly high while writing this one.

There is an awesome review here.

I’m finally free! Worst experience of my life!

the last hour of for philip guston in written form.

ooooh yeah, it is worm time

Words turned into meaningless noise.