Laying Out the Bones by English Bridget;

Author:English, Bridget;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Setting himself against religious and novelistic rules of dying, Malone seeks to narrate his dying process and to control the moment of his death. Yet as he soon realizes death itself is a state of formlessness, of silence, that which defies representation, Malone’s project of self-annihilation is doomed to fail. Despite his best efforts, he cannot rid himself of the compulsion to narrate or the human need for meaning.

The persistence of religious references in Malone Dies alongside notions of death as oblivion suggests a disjuncture between the religious and the secular but also indicates that these two ways of making sense of death are not as disconnected as they may first appear. Even as Malone attempts to destroy religious structures of meaning, residual longings for the hope offered by Christian notions of heaven remain. In an effort to situate himself within a temporal sequence, Malone questions whether it could be Easter Week: “If it can, could this song I have just heard, and which quite frankly is not quite stilled within me, could this song have simply been to the honour and glory of him who was the first to rise from the dead, to him who saved me, twenty centuries in advance? Did I say the first? The final bawl lends colour to this view.”58 Malone’s location on the brink of absence, between the speakable and the unspeakable, impels his narration, but it also reveals his need for meaning despite his knowledge that there is none.

In many ways, Malone Dies is the opposite of the bildungsroman, which depicts the moral and psychological development of a character from adolescence to adulthood, and instead depicts a process of unraveling or unmaking.59 Beckett’s novel is neither a manual on how to die nor a novel that describes a coming into being; rather, it is an exercise in representing the process of dying. Elaine Scarry discusses the problems involved in representing physical pain and death. She argues that any given subject resists representation, forcing the writer to alter sentence structure to accommodate this resistance, in essence shaping the writing around the resisting subject. In the case of Beckett’s narratives, she argues, intentional objects are eliminated in order to draw attention to the universal human condition: “Given complexity and uncertainty, Beckett, in effect, clears the boards and begins again with those things about which we can be certain. Each of his works isolates and bestows visibility on modes of feeling, thinking, and acting that collectively constitute the central human experience.”60 The structure of Malone Dies is shaped around the unrepresentable subject of death. Malone’s efforts to narrate this experience involve novelistic structures that have traditionally used death as a boundary to contain human experience and endow it with meaning. Malone’s invocations of religious imagery reveal the human need for these devices to offer hope and at the same time emphasize how pointless these efforts are.

In the novel, death traditionally functions as a narrative limit, a way of revealing the boundaries that give meaning to life.

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