he has reached after buying his ticket to the end of the line. The beginning of section four reads: 'As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end.' The contorted word order of this sentence draws attention to the contorted way in which the chronological order of Watt's narration has been rearranged by Sam. Neither order is that of the fabula (or basic story line); both are versions of syuzhet (or plotted rearrangement of the story). In Sam's version of the story it is Watt's stay at Knott's house that is illusory, contained within the «realistic» outer sections; in Watt's telling it is the everyday world of sections one and four that are made to appear illusory, contained within the two sections describing Watt's stay at Knott's house. By this means Beckett avoids giving primacy to either the world of the mind or that of the body. This neat interchangeability is further complicated by the fact that the opening and closing pages of the novel cannot have been witnessed by Watt or told by him to Sam. Moreover, Watt's only direct speech appears in section three where he communicates with Sam by pronouncing words, then sentences, backward. So the entire fiction paradoxically uses Sam's words to describe a near-wordless protagonist whose use of words has been negated by the wordless Knott.
After Watt Beckett underwent a double revolution. On a short visit to Dublin in 1946 he had a blinding flash of insight in which he realized that the 'dark side' of his personality should provide him with the true subject of his work. His new aim was to conduct an interior excavation of that darkness that he 'had struggled to keep under.' At about the same time he began writing in an acquired, alien language-French-to curb the remnants of what I have called his Irish Gothic. In French, he claimed, 'it is easier to write without style.' He proceeded to write -849- a novel, Mercier et Camier, that he witheld from publication until 1970, partly because he drew on some of it for Waiting for Godot. The same year he wrote four nouvelles that anticipate in theme and form the trilogy of novels that was to establish his reputation in the field of fiction. They show Beckett turning to the interior monologue as the form best suited to his new desire for self-excavation. Each protagonist, like his successors in the trilogy, tells himself 'this story that aspires to be the last.'
In a spurt of creativity between 1947 and 1949 Beckett wrote Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (Malone meurt, 1953), and The Unnamable (L'innommable, 1953). Each novel has its own pseudocouple, avatars or stand-ins for Beckett, the narrating subject. Molloy is divided into the story of Molloy from the moment he set out on crutches and bicycle to find his mother to his arrival in her room where he sits in bed writing his story, and the story of Moran, who sets out in search of Molloy with his son and ends up writing a report of his failure to find him. Malone Dies describes Malone, in bed in a room similar to that of Molloy's mother, writing stories (while waiting to die) about one Saposcat (a combination of homo sapiens and skatos, Greek for excrement), who turns into Macmann (son of man-or of Malone, the evil one). The Unnamable offers the narrative of a disembodied voice that conjures up images of two postmortem 'vice-existers,' Mahood (manhood?), a trunk and head without limbs stuck in a jar, and Worm, an even more rudimentary creature with minimal human attributes. All three novels focus on a representative human consciousness trying to come to terms with its existence by telling itself stories featuring itself as hero of its own fictions.
Each of the three novels is an exercise in self-destruction. Molloy illustrates in particular the antichronological thrust of Beckett's project. Moran's apparent failure to track down Molloy is undercut by the way he is transformed in the course of his search from the confident agent and authoritarian father at the start of his narrative to an uncanny copy (down to the crutches) of Molloy, whose story preceded his. The reason in part is that Moran, like Molloy, is searching for his true self, whatever that might be. 'And as for myself, that unfailing pastime… there were moments when it did not seem so far from me, when I seemed to be drawing towards it… ' That self is what Beckett once called 'the narrator narrated.' Beckett uses his successive pairs of protagonists to try to stalk this self, to illuminate his darkness that con-
-850- stantly recedes before the light of his narrational pursuit. So the trilogy is equally about the predicament of representative man who tries to reach the core of his being by recounting his life to himself, and about the predicament of the modern artist bent on exploring the source of his imagination by telling stories to himself (and others) that alienate him from the «real» world. The predicament, as Beckett described it in his early critical work on Proust, is that to be a modern artist 'is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world, and to shrink from it desertion.' As the Unnamable reassures himself, 'I am doing my best, and failing again.'
Seen thematically, each successive novel appears to repeat the pattern established in its predecessor. In the structuralist terms of the French semiotician A. J. Greimas, Beckett seems to be presenting the same 'immanent level' of narration, the same paradigmatic story, in all three novels. And yet there is an apparent progression from the two narrators' accounts of their increasingly impeded physical journeys in Molloy, to Malone's written account of the wanderings of fictional substitutes, to the Unnamable's wholly verbal meanderings where to 'go on' means to go on voicing his mental search for an escape from his world of words. In each novel the narrator succeeds in scaling down his need-from wanting to reach his mother, to wanting to die, to wanting to stop speaking. As the recurrent narrative structure only emerges after the second and third novels have been read, Beckett is able to lure his readers into the same illusion suffered by his successive protagonists-that they are making progress. In Beckett's bleak view of human existence we delude ourselves into thinking that things are changing in order to avoid the harsh truth that life is fundamentaly repetitive. As Malone reminds himself, 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.' Perception is subjective and fallible. 'What I best see I see ill,' says the Unnamable. Memory fails us, so that we cannot remember whether we have been through any particular experience before. Time is circular, space illusory. 'I am being given,' Malone writes, 'if I may venture the expression, birth into death.' As John Fletcher pointed out, Malone Dies illustrates Georges Bataille's observation that man is the only creature who spends his life mythologizing his death.
So all the narrators and their doubles are seeking for a place of final rest-their mother's room (or womb), physical death, an end to speech. Each successive narrator pursues a more reductive search of the self; -851- each fails. Why? Because the self belongs to the void of the real. The void or néant belongs to a realm of silence. But humans are condemned to the false linearity, rationality, and semantic properties of language. Put in Lacanian terms, each of us longs to return to the blissful ignorance of infancy when our experience was one of pure libido (or Obidil, as Moran calls it, whom he 'longed to see face to face'). Instead we are condemned to a symbolic order in which language constitutes us as subjects split within ourselves. We are split between a conscious self whose lack condemns us to a lifetime of unfulfilled desire and an unconscious forever deferred along the signifying chain of language. We are also split between a desire for unity and a lack of concrete being. This is what Moran terms 'being dispossessed of self.' The Unnamable resorts to paradox to describe the paradoxical nature of human consciousness divided within itself: 'Where I am there is no one but me, who am not.'
The trilogy takes this predicament of ours and doggedly explores it until it has reduced the problem to one of pure language in The Unnamable. The voice in this third novel desperately looks for a way to reach silence, just as the narrator looks for a way finally to end his narration by telling the story of himself instead of that of 'the ponderous chronicle of moribunds' that the trilogy has produced. His problem is bound up in the nature of language, especially in the unique nature of the firstand second-person pronouns. Beckett appears to have anticipated the formulations of the French structuralist linguist, Emile Benveniste. Benveniste argues that the pronouns I and you, unlike other signifiers, only produce signifieds in concrete discursive contexts. Unlike tree, say, I has no concrete meaning until it appears in a specific context. There it signifies somebody only for the duration of the discourse in which it appears. 'So,' Benveniste concludes, 'it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.' This also means that in between two discursive moments subjectivity evaporates. When Malone loses his pencil for forty-eight hours, on recovering it he writes, 'I have spent two unforgettable days of which nothing will ever be known… ' This is why all the narrators in the trilogy pant on to the end-because it is only by continuing to speak in the first person that they can hope to constitute themselves as subjects. As the Unnamable says, 'the discourse must go on,' because 'I'm in words, made of words, others' words.'
Why 'others' words'? Because, as Benveniste explains, any discursive use of I entails two subjects, the speaking subject, or 'referent,' and the
-852- subject of speech, or 'referee.' He goes on to insist that these two Is can never be collapsed into one another. The spoken subject acts as a signifier. By identifying with this signifier the speaking subject hopes to define his or her subjectivity. In Beckett's trilogy the spoken subject is invariably one of the speaking subject's many 'vice-existers,' by means of which the narrator seeks to signify his own self. He would like to collapse this distinction, to be, as the Unnamable longs to be, 'the teller and the told.' Instead the narrator is carried helplessly along a chain of signifiers-his 'troop of lunatics,' never reaching the signified of himself. 'When I think,' says the Unnamable,