Death in Quest of Narrative

Carmen Muşat
Telling the story of one’s life implies as many fictional devices (in the etymological sense of the
word fiction) as writing a novel. The narrative pattern of each and every life, like our very
understanding of the world as narrative understanding, makes human beings so sensitive to prose
writing.
Yet, expectation may be considered one of the most intriguing features uniting and
differentiating life and fiction. It follows that it is important to clarify the relationship between to
wait and to expect in constructing narratives, since when it comes to narrative there are at least
three instances defined by their attitudes toward time: the narrator, the character(s) and the
reader. Along these lines, expectation refers not only to suspense (which has to do with the plot),
but also to what Hans Robert Jauss calls the „horizon of expectation“. It is as much as saying
that expectation affects both the story (id est fictional time and space) and the reading process.
*
When I read Malone Dies for the first time, the first thought was to connect Beckett’s vision on
dying with Tolstoy’s, to consider both what they have in common and what differentiates these
two (narrative) roads to death. But does Beckett’s novel Malone Dies have anything in common
with The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy’s powerful story of enduring and dying? To make a long
answer short by paraphrasing the title of one of Paul Ricoeur’s studies I should say that what we
have in both texts is not “life in quest of narrative”, but death in quest of narrative. While the end
of the story is no secret for the reader, being announced in the titles, which contains death as the
only horizon of expectations, for the main characters things are lot more complicated. For Ivan
Ilych and Malone as well, memory and imagination are the only possibilities to “tame” the time
left, while narrative develops as a cognitive organizing process. In these fictional pieces there is
no anticipation other than that already announced in the title, yet there are various ways of
narrating the passage of time in between, revealing the multifold narrative identity of the
suffering self.

Becoming a stranger to oneself

In literature loss, sorrow, death and mourning trigger the “work of memory” that sometimes ends
up as retrospective narrative. The more unexpected the end, the more necessary the challenge of
self-investigating by narrative means. Yet, the recovered self is nonetheless a transitional one, no
less a transactional one, given that this very self is a result of the ongoing “negotiation” of
memory, language1 and imagination. The major effect of selfhood crisis yielded by the intense

1
According to Heidegger, language is an activity of disclosure, essential both for self-construction and for self-
understanding.
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suffering (such as the imminence of death in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych brings forth) may at
times turn out to be the imperative of remembering the story of his/her life. But while Tolstoy’s
title suggests that the ultimate moment in a lifetime is in fact the final state of being, il punto a
cui tutti li tempi son presenti (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XVII), Beckett prefers to consider the
process of a life coming to an end. While reconsidering his whole life, Ivan Ilych undergoes a
radical change. He feels the urge to go back to his past and revaluate everything in it. The slow
process of self-understanding brings out the tragic incongruence between the expectations of
Ivan Ilych and the actual shape of his life. Mark Freeman notes that “Ivan Ilych had been living
his life without an ending in mind” (1997: 388) although on the medallion hanging on his watch-
chain there was inscribed respice finem (consider the end). After all, Ivan Ilych is a victim of the
sharp irony of destiny. His existence is linear and comme il faut, as long as he lives in a society
in which the rules are powerful and engender a complex system of expectations: everything
seems to be prescribed and predictable, language, behavior, gestures, even feelings so that his
life is a pleasant, “frivolous, agreeable, light-hearted life, always decorous and always approved
by society” (Tolstoy: 91).

The unexpected disrupts the apparent equilibrium of a shallow life, at first “in the early months
of his wife’s pregnancy”, then at the very moment when Ivan Ilych was confident that everything
would went on “without change, and everything was very nice” (Tolstoy: 100). While watching
his life falling apart, Ivan Ilych tries to grasp the significance of his existential journey and all he
gains is a deep moral suffering, even worse than the physical torment. Due to the sudden
revelation of the lack of sense in his life, Tolstoy’s character grows more and more aware of the
“decorous deception” and the “deadly official life” that enhance the “enigma of life and death”
(Tolstoy: 124). For Ivan Ilych it was the unexpected (sheer contingency) that shed an intense
light on the banality of his life story. “I’m dying, and it’s only a question of weeks, of days”
(Tolstoy: 109). The awareness of his deadly illness comes as a blow on his lethargic conscience
and all he can do is to confront Death. The more tense the confrontation, the deeper his misery
and revolt against the human condition. Therefore, from the moment he understands there is no
expectation (hope) left for him, other than his death, the waiting time becomes a dramatic wake.
From now on, Ivan Ilych rejects the idea of doing what he is expected to do. The discovery of
solitude is augmented by an overwhelming feeling that he no longer is the person he used to be.
At the same time Ivan Ilych becomes aware that he doesn’t know who he really is, since the
person he used to be turns out to be a mere shadow, a total stranger to his deep inner self. The
looking-glass test triggers a storm of agony, anger, misery, horror and despair that annihilate
even the feeblest shadow of hope. Ivan Ilych’s wake is gloomy and deprived of the sense of
future. All that is left is a dumb state of watching beside his own body before the ultimate
encounter with death, which he cannot even name: “Alone with It. Face to face with It, and
nothing to be done with It. Nothing but to look at It and shiver.” (Tolstoy: 112)

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“The blessedness of absence”

As for Malone, there is no attempt on his part to reconsider his life story – if there be anything
like this for “him”. The bed-ridden Malone, whose body is almost invisible, but whose voice is
telling us so many stories, the shadowy Malone whose identity is uncertain from beginning till
end, the word-being Malone who decides to be “neutral and inert” and to let himself “die,
quietly, without rushing things” (Beckett: 3), the comatose Malone who acknowledges that he
has spent all his life “in a kind of coma” (Beckett: 7), never expecting anything to happen, this
neutral voice echoing in the wake of death is not at all a human being, but only a linguistic
structure, a textual instance, res cogitans2, physically weak and discontinuous, incapable of
ethically responsible action. I think, therefore I am and nothing else matters, no space, no past,
no future, only this incessant flow of consciousness, which has no other beginning nor other end
than the limits of the text. For Malone there is no past to remember and reconsider, as long as
everything has to be invented in an everlasting game, a language game. “Now it is a game, I am
going to play” proclaims the voice when it finds itself “alone in the dark” (Malone Dies: 4), the
dark that precedes birth and comes after death. “Then I shall play with myself” comes the adagio,
which tells us about the uncertainty of the point of view and about the melting pot of identities in
Beckett’s narrative. For Richard Kearney, who produced a bold theory of stories, storytelling is
never neutral” since “every narrative bears some evaluative charge regarding the events narrated
and the actors featured in the narration” (Kearney, 2002: 155). Yet, Malone’s stories are
deprived of any ethical value, they are not meant to be read or listened by someone else. The
blurred memories of childhood enhance the impression that for Beckett’s character the past is but
an invention to create the illusion of a biography and to fill the emptiness preceding death. With
Malone there is still another problem to solve: if there is no contingency between mind and body,
how can there be any relationship with someone else, outside the limits of this particular
language game? How can there be any encounter with another if there is no corporeal presence,
if there is only the voice/the mind and no actual body to carry them? Moreover, how can there be
a personal narrative since the flux of discourse brings about no coherence and no expectations at
all, either on the diegesis level or on that of reader response? Some more questions regarding this
logic and ontological paradox are to be found in Landy’s study on Beckett:

2
In Paul Davies’ opinion, “Beckett’s lost, blind, will-less, impotent, dried-up tramps and wanderers are the
casualties of Cartesianism.” (1994: 45). Joshua Landy (2012) shares the same point of view in his commentary
about Beckett’s writings. Memories fades, physical features change, even beliefs and desires do not remain the
same. Then what is this “I” that a person still uses to designate him or her? Landy’s answer may give us a glimpse
into this enigma: “If we take the reduction to its logical limit, we are left with a vanishing small kernel. Nor can that
kernel ever be seen, since it is precisely what always does the seeing. «All my senses are trained on me», says
Malone, «I am no prey for them»: when I look, that is, I see «me» - the conglomeration of detachable parts – and
never the «I» that constitutes my core identity.” (2012: 132)

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 “If mind and body are indeed separate, how can such two-way interaction be possible? If
not, am I a different person every time something happens to my body? Every time I
catch cold? Every time a strand of hair changes color? Every time a single cell is
replaced?” (Landy: 132).

Beckett’s novels seem to give a positive answer to such questions. “Malone is what I am called
now” exclaims the narrator, suggesting that Malone, Sapo, Macmann, Mahood, Murphy,
Lemuel, Watt and so on are different etiquettes, applied to the same “content”. Although their
names differ, the stories all these characters tell are very much alike since each and every one
speaks about void, about absence, and waiting. Lacking a real sense of beginning and end, in
epic terms, these narratives may be read as the ongoing discourse produced by a mind which
splits itself in many pieces/ voices. Beckett subverts the very fundaments of narrative as “a
fundamentally communicative act” which, according to Kearney (1998: 246), opens the self “to
the foreign and unfamiliar worlds of others”, thus being able to “transfigure the ego into a
representative subject”.

“By recounting the story of one’s life in response to the other’s question – who are you?
– the narrative self constitutes itself as a perduring identity over time, capable of
sustaining commitments and pledges to the other than self.” (Kearney, 1998: 247)

Yet Beckett’s narratives do not respond to any of these constrains, his characters do not know
who they are (or if they are anything else than the actual flow of words) and their life stories are
nothing more than word stories as they lack the cohesion necessary to a proper life story. With
him, proper names are fluid, because there is no “solid” referent to point to, no personal identity
and no memory to support it.

Originally entitled L’Absent, Malone dies offers a very subversive approach to the novelistic
form. For John Bolin, Beckett’s novel, although subversive, is “the closest within the Three
Novels to a paradigm of diary fiction” (Bolin: 154). Perhaps the most striking feature of Malone
Dies is its lack of plot. In spite of the many stories told by the narrator, there is no suspense, no
narrative tension, nothing to wait for. Regardless of the similarities it shares with the diaristic
discourse, however, Malone’s narrative reveals the “comedy of substitution” that Beckett himself
identified in Proust. Who (or what) is Malone after all, is he the voice of the author, the written
trace of it on the white page? We may say that this novel of Beckett’s, more than the others, has
a meta-narrative quality, showing the complex relationship between the author – the great absent
in a fictional narrative –and his/her fictional masks. Far from being a dying man diary, this is
rather the notebook of a Deus absconditus, “me alone”, a vulnerable and tired being, who
chooses to retreat from the worlds he is constantly creating and destroying:

“My exercise-book, I don’t see it, but I feel it in my hand, I don’t know where it comes
from, I didn’t have it when I came here, but I feel it is mine. That’s the style, as if I were

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 sweet and seventy. In that case the bed would be mine too, and the little table, the dish,
the pots, the cupboard, the blankets. No, nothing of all that is mine. But the exercise-book
is mine, I can’t explain. The two pencils then, the exercise-book and then the stick, which
I did not have either when I came here, but which I consider mine, I must have described
it long ago. I am quiet, I have time, but I shall describe as little possible.” (Malone Dies:
75)

Yet the outstanding parallelism between the progressive disruption of selfhood (which
authorship implies) and the weakening of narrative coherence does not suspend narrative
identity, although the personal identity is under erasure. The dying Malone is in an avowed state
of “decomposition”, eager to introduce “a little variety” into it by telling stories, “almost lifeless
stories, like the teller”. Or, as Beckett himself put it in a well-known title of his, this ongoing
storytelling is “imagination dead imagine”. The proliferation of stories told by this self-centred
“I” reflects the ongoing process of waiting for the end: it is not clear at all if the end is that of the
narrative itself (that is the discourse and the stories it contains), or the end of the narrator’s life.
Surveying Beckett’s trilogy, Maurice Blanchot describes Malone as “a wandering speech, one
that is not deprived of meaning, but deprived of centre, that does not begin, does not end, yet is
greedy, demanding, will never stop” (Blanchot: 210). Blanchot’s approach of Malone draws on
the main elements of Beckettian storytelling: wandering speech, ambiguity of meaning, absence
of a “centre”, and uncertainty of beginning and end. While waiting for the end, Malone is
brooding:

“Perhaps I had better abandon this story and go on to the second, or even the third, the
one about the stone. No, it would be the same thing“. (Malone Dies: 13)

This is a significant confession, about how the authorial mind is working, about the “casualties”
of losing worldly reference and representation. And it could be more than that since there is a
deep feeling of loss and confusion regarding the content of the “I”, not only as a Being, but as
subject of speech as well. What remains is mere discourse “on the point of vanishing”,
deconstruction of all those worlds of words as soon as they are born. In the fourth sequence of
Texts for Nothing, the same confusion about the status of the “I” is transcribed: “Where would I
go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this,
saying it’s me?” (Stories and Texts for Nothing: 91). Is this “I” a human being at all, deprived as
it is of any attributes of space (where), of personal identity (who), and not in the least of a
narrative (what)? Contradictory as it is, Malone (which is another way of saying “I’m alone”)
finds himself thrown into existence, in that sort of existence that Levinas comments upon in Time
and the Other, starting from the Heideggerian concept of Geworfenheit3. Malone is in between

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The “fact-of-being-thrown-in” existence translates into English Heidegger’s notion, Geworfenheit. “It is as if the
existent appeared only in an existence that precedes it, as though existence were independent of the existent, and
the existent that finds itself thrown there could never become master of existence. It is precisely because of this
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existence and nonexistence, life and death, in between himself and another, it is just a voice
which can assume any form, be it human or nonhuman.

“But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying,
I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor
where I am, nor if I am. Yes, a little creature. I shall try and make a little creature, to hold
in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor
thing I have made, or how I like myself, I shall eat it. Then be alone a long time,
unhappy, not knowing what my prayer should be, nor to whom.” (Malone Dies: 53)

It seems that Malone is but a narrative stratagem, a voice devoid not only of a body but of a
world as such. For “him”, unlike Ivan Ilych, death is and is not a matter of imminence and/or of
immanence. The grounding of his stories entirely upon language adds to the impression that “he”
is only a narrative device. In Tolstoy’s narrative suffering and death are personal concerns, even
more appalling for Ivan Ilych since the world does not end with his death. The awareness of the
lack of sympathy for his tantalizing agony accentuates Ivan Ilych’s deception and misery. He
resents the fact that “no one felt for him as he would have liked them to feel for him” which
deepens his “fearful loneliness”. Waiting for “that fearful fall” and dissolution, Ivan Ilych finds
his refuge in his childhood memories. There seems to be nothing personal left for Beckett’s
character, no such childhood memories for Malone, whose death is uncertain and has nothing
frightening in it, as long as “the end” comes as a final con-fusion of Malone, Macmann and
Lemuel (at least), and at the same time with the destruction of syntax and of textual coherence4.

that there is desertion and abandonment. Thus dawns the idea of an existing that occurs without us, without a
subject, an existing without existents. Without doubt Jean Wahl would say that an existing without existents is only
a word.” (Levinas, op.cit.: 45-46) Considering Malone’s lack of any kind of “roots”, we may say that he/it is the
perfect example of “an existing without existents”, a word. Levinas’ commentary may offer a starting point for
understanding Beckett’s attempt to describe the “complete disintegration” of self and narrative: “How are we
going to approach this existing without existents? Let us imagine all things, beings and persons, returning to
nothingness. What remains after this imaginary destruction of everything is not something, but the fact that there
is [il y a]. The absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of
everything, an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the void, or the murmur of silence. There is, after this
destruction of things and beings, the impersonal ‘field of forces’ of existing.” (idem). In the French versions of his
texts, Beckett uses frequently the formula which Levinas considers to be “what remains after this imaginary
destruction”, il y a, the perfect formula to transcribe dereliction. In fact, all the Beckettian characters are derelicts,
vagabonds and ruins of humanity, at the same time. Their confusion is not only linguistic, but ontological.

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“Macmann, my last, my possessions, I remember, he is there too, perhaps he sleeps. Lemuel

Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will
not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or

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However, storytelling is still possible as long as words and names do carry latent meanings (and
sometimes even latent stories emerge within them) which a reader is able to recognize. Such is
the name Malone chooses for the characters in his first story, that of the Lamberts, pointing to
the well-known novel of Balzac which tackles with the split between inward and outward
existence.

In Malone Dies, there is no narrative dynamics other than that of sheer arbitrariness. Malone’s
stories proliferate, lacking epic coherence and motivation. He is inventing them to relieve the
“mortal tedium” from a life that seems to have no significance at all 5. Nevertheless, since he has

or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will
never

or with his pencil or with his stick or

or light light I mean

never there he will never

never anything

there

any more” (Malone Dies: 119)

As you can see, there is no full stop at the end of Malone’s narrative, which looks like a poem after all. The
ambiguity is enhanced by this last attempt to self-annihilation as a result of narrative decomposition, while the
white spaces reflect the suspension, and even the growing sense of absence. In Christopher Ricks’ words, Malone’s
death looks like “a form of linguistic suicide” (Ricks, 1993: 153).

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“I was born grave as other syphilitic. And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent, I know what I
mean. But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live
nor suffer the sight of others living. I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I
was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing. I wonder why I speak of all this. Ah yes, to relieve the
tedium. Live and cause to live. There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After
the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another.
How false all this is. No time now to explain. I began again. But little by little with a different aim, no longer in
order to succeed, but in order to fail. Nuance. What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through
the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the
relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and
whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched
over me, who suffered every time I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have
never seen. There I am forgetting myself again. My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and
whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last, I don’t know how. Of myself I could never tell,
any more than live or tell of others. How could I have, who never tried? To show myself now, on the point of
vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw. Then live,
long enough to feel, behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. What an end.” (Malone Dies: 20-21) It seems to me
that here we have an amazing description of the relationship between author and narrator, both textual instances,
dependable on one another and prisoners of the paper world.
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no interlocutor, no reader or listener in mind, the narrator feels free to play as he wishes during
his waiting for death to come. In Beckett’s view, tedium, coming from the Latin taedium, is more
than boredom, it means sheer disgust that brings forth the Kierkegaardian “sickness unto death”.
The most striking feature of Malone is his difficulty to think and to talk about himself as about
someone who has a certain identity. Not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be
oneself, Beckett’s character fails to become an individuality. “I will tell myself stories” he keeps
saying, but the stories he produces show no internal connection. Telling stories is only a way of
passing time, his time, the time left for him until his announced and expected death. After all,
Malone is an anti-Scheherazade, who tells stories not to save his life, but to fill the absurd gap
that life is. For him there is no other being in the outer world but only the void engulfing and
enveloping all beings after death. With Beckett, the narrative relation is a particular one since it
is the narrator himself whom the “I” is addressing. It is through story-telling that the narrator
himself succeeds to become the Other, being at the same time the narrator, the characters in the
story (Sapo, Lemuel, Macmann etc.) and the listener.

As David Sherman points out, “Beckett dramatizes this purposelessness of the narrated to make a
narrative poetics of ethical frustration, a poetics that binds the reader to the narrator as one
seeking to realize and redeem the narrator’s ethical passivity against its narrative intentionality.”
(Sherman: 76) Can there be any relation between the voice assuming the first-person narrative
and the reader since there is no implied reader other than the narrator himself? Beckett has
Malone invent stories for his own purpose which is less unusual than the fact there is no one to
listen to what he has to tell. But there is another startling comment made by Sherman: he speaks
about

“a pointed narrative dilemma: the more one narrates oneself and one’s origins, the less
one has of oneself. Beckett suggests the paradox by which the self is less accountable for
itself the more it exercises narrative intention.” (Sherman: 78)

Yet, let us not forget that Malone’s first and foremost intention is to play. Telling stories,
inventing them rather, is a game. And this particular game is as limitless as any other game. As a
matter of fact, our ability to conceive of our origin is counterbalanced by our inability to
conceive of our end. So what is left to someone who seems to have no actual body and who is
doomed to wait for his/her death from the very beginning? What else can he do unless try to
invent different accounts of possible selves, in a dramatic attempt to dissolve the kernel of his
endangered identity? Accountability is not the only important element of a successful narrative.
There has to be more than that – coherence, for instance, cohesion, and continuity, which
presupposes a great deal of expectancy on the part of the reader. In Malone Dies there is nothing
like that. The situations and events are haphazard, one cannot foresee what will happen next in
the story, nor who the main character will be. Sherman brings Blanchot into discussion to
analyze a possible encounter between Levinas and Beckett. For Sherman,

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 “the ethical drama of Beckett’s novel about a man, as he dies, telling us a story about
another, is the drama of taking responsibility in the context of narrative irony and
refraction. It is the drama of negotiating who has to take responsibility for whom when no
single one has been assigned responsibility for any single other.” (Sherman: 72)

If Levinas is right and the origin of the unified self is the encounter with the other, then Malone’s
failure to encounter anyone else is the key to understanding his scattered self, dissolved into all
the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones (see Malone Dies: 63) who are produced
through and echoed by the stories he tells. Malone thus paradoxically acknowledges he is
himself part of many other stories, of which some are told by himself, while others have
unknown origins.

(Fragment from my essay Forms and Figures of Waiting, to be published next year)

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Works cited

Beckett, Samuel, 1967. Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, Samuel, 2010. Malone Dies. London: Faber and Faber.

Tolstoy, Leo, 2004. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. Introduction and Notes by Dr. T.
C. B. Cook, Wordsworth Classics.

Blanchot, Maurice, 2003. “Who Now? Where Now?” in: Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come,
translated by Charlotte Mandell. California: Stanford University Press, pp. 210-217.

Bolin, John, 2013. Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Currie, Mark, 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davies, Paul, 1994. “Three Novels and Four nouvelles: Giving up the Ghost Be Born at Last” in
John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 43-66.

Freeman, Mark. “Death, Narrative Integrity, and the Radical Challenge of Self-Understanding: A
Reading of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych” in Ageing and Society, Cambridge University Press,
17, 1997, pp. 373-398.

Kearney, Richard, 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern. New York: Fordham
University Press.

Kearney, Richard, 2002. On Stories. London and New York: Routledge.

Kermode, Frank, 2000. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New
Epilogue. Oxford University Press.

Landy, Joshua, 2012. How to Do Things with Fictions. Oxford University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel, 1987. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press.

Ricks, Christopher, 1993. Beckett’s Dying Words. The Clarendon Lectures 1990. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul, 1991. “Narrative Identity” in Philosophy Today (Spring 1991): pp. 73-81.

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Ricoeur, Paul, 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press

Sherman, David, 2009. “Is Narrative Fundamental? Beckett’s Levinasian Question in Malone
Dies” in Journal of Modern Literature. Volume 32, Number 4. pp. 65-81.

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