Three Novels. Samuel Beckett
Three Novels
Molloy
Malone Dies
The Unnamable
WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Collected Poems in English and French
The Collected Shorter Plays
(All That Fall, Act Without Words I,
Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . , A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)
The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski
(Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1–8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment
Endgame and Act Without Words
First Love and Other Shorts
Grove Centenary Editions
Volume I: Novels
(Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)
Volume II: Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is)
Volume III: Dramatic Works
Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism
Happy Days
Happy Days: Production Notebooks
How It Is
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On:
A Samuel Beckett Reader
Krapp’s Last Tape
(All That Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)
Mercier and Camier
Molloy
More Pricks Than Kicks
(Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong,
A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out,
What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)
Murphy
Nohow On
(Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho)
Proust
The Shorter Plays: Theatrical Notebooks, edited by S. E. Gontarski
(Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time, What Where, Not I)
Stories and Texts for Nothing
(The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13)
Three Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition
Waiting for Godot: Theatrical Notebooks
Watt
Three Novels
Samuel Beckett
Molloy
Malone Dies
The Unnamable
Molloy, originally published under the title Molloy, copyright © 1947 by Les Editions de Minuit. The English translation by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author copyright © 1955 by The Estate of Patrick Bowles and The Estate of Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies, originally published under the title Malone meurt, copyright © 1951 by Les Editions de Minuit. Translation copyright © 1956 by The Estate of Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable, originally published under the title L’Innommable, copyright © 1953 by Les Editions de Minuit. Translation copyright © 1958 by The Estate of Samuel Beckett
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Printed in the United States of America
Design and textual supervision by Laura Lindgren
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9829-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13886
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Three Novels
Molloy
Malone Dies
The Unnamable
I
I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying. They don’t want that. Yes, there is more than one, apparently. But it’s always the same one that comes. You’ll do that later, he says. Good. The truth is I haven’t much will left. When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week’s. They are marked with signs I don’t understand. Anyway I don’t read them. When I’ve done nothing he gives me nothing, he scolds me. Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much. For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don’t know. Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet. In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son. Perhaps I have one somewhere. But I think not. He would be old now, nearly as old as myself. It was a little chambermaid. It wasn’t true love. The true love was in another. We’ll come to that. Her name? I’ve forgotten it again. It seems to me