The Unnamable is about freedom. It's pretty easily the freest text Samuel Beckett ever wrote. All of the novels preceding it were infected with literature, Joyce, traditions of Irish humor, etc, to some extent, even as they strained--quite successfully at times--to break free of these fetters. Writing in French was an important step, freeing the authorial voice from much of its learned shackles of English literary style, enabling the voice to more freely and simply say what the voice wanted to say, what the voice wasn't sure it could say, and its troubling to wonder how to say both what it had to and could not say. More than any other text I've ever encountered, The Unnamable comes the closest to F. T. Marinetti's Futurist ideal of words-in-freedom. The voice speaks, unfettered by literature, about how a literary text could possibly come into being and, if it were to come into being, what could it possibly say?

This voice is so free it could never conform to the constraints of the form, could not possibly construct a novel. And yet, by bringing into question all that a novel might be, it does. The novel, if written, could have no title. Therefore it is entitled "the unnamable," a name that means that it cannot be named. The voice explores many options in its search for silence, which happens through speaking. Its I and its he are incessantly self-questioned, previous Beckett characters invoked and discarded, as the voice describes first a Mahood and then a new character, Worm, who again, being a he, isn't quite and yet can only be a part of this I that cannot speak but must speak of how it cannot speak--in order to arrive at no longer speaking.

This raw, un-moored narrative voice searches for a place, a setting, that cannot be invoked because the narrative voice is neither here nor there. All the time it worries about them, what they would have it say, what they have taught it, what they want. They are really us, I believe, the audience before the fact, the nonexistent army of readers pre-imagined in the wholly non-publishable book. We/they are a nasty, demanding lot. We probably think this book is about us, we're so vain. But of course it is--to whom else would the narrative voice speak? We, too, are there in the non-place, following the words that cannot tell a story, that tell the story of not being able to tell the story, that speak toward silence, that cannot go on, but do, and must, go on.

And Beckett did go on. And, though I love many of his later texts, perhaps even more than this one, never again did he let the voice roam quite this freely. Savor this exalted moment, maybe the freest in the whole of our literature.