Cliché and Memory

Abstract

To look for the ‘real’, what it is that might be ‘represented’, in Beckett’s mature writing is of necessity to look for memory. First of all, to write any character from any point of view is to concern oneself with his or her memory, his or her past. And in addition, much of Beckett’s work in particular is first-person narrative, concerned exclusively with a character’s own memories. The first works in French in particular—Beckett’s novellas of the late 1940s, the great trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and his early theatre—all give particular emphasis to the idea of memory and its relation to the narrating subject. How much of this memory, this chapter asks, can be seen to be the subject’s ‘own’, and that authority is this ambiguous material given in their negotiation of themselves and the world?