Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies is void of the traditional conventions inherent to a novel—stories are abandoned just as quickly as they begin, characters are hollow caricatures, setting and plot are practically nonexistent, and language is split and fragmented to the point of incoherence. The novel, by virtue of these characteristics, is a fundamentally modern piece of work and therefore susceptible to the same critiques levied against the movement of modernism as a whole.  Critics such as the German philosopher Georg Lukács find the modernist novel to be an utter failure due to its radical subjectivity, overall style, and inability to provide an appropriate response to the ultimate question all literature should strive towards answering: what is man? In this paper, I will use the poststructuralist theory of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to demonstrate how the novel provides an answer to the question of humanity through tracing the journey of the voice, or consciousness, which is confined beneath the surface narration of Malone. Beckett demonstrates the voice’s attempts to break free from a perpetually falsifying narration through deconstructing narrative and language all the way down to the syntactic level, exhausting the language to the point that something new begins to emerge. A study of the voice, in conjunction with the other strata of narrative in the novel, will undermine Lukács’s critiques against modernism by proving that Malone Dies, the quintessential modernist novel, is not just pessimistic, philosophical blather—but rather a modern masterpiece about the importance of throwing aside the pretext in an attempt to finally reach a beginning.