The Unusual Narrator’s Threshold Position in the Secret Agent Society of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

Mohammadreza Arghiani

doi:10.5539/ells.v1n2p106

Abstract

The current study covers topics ranging across The Unnamable’s narrative, its unusual narrative methodology, its use of storytelling and sense making, and also in an interdisciplinary manner focuses on post-modern philosophy. It positions The Unnamable’s narrative largely at the doorstep of both deconstructive and constructive paradigms and via this approach aims to explore the potential of narrative and narrator in conveying different tacit understandings. This study will be suited for readers because it provides special form of discourse for perceiving the implications of narrator’s experience and also textual analysis. In this regard, the study underlines subjects such as unusual narrator’s threshold position, narrator’s lingual games, predetermined principles and also the concept of panopticon in the Secret Agent Society of the narrative.

Highlights

The Unnamable is the tail entry in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy
The Unnamable’s narrator sometimes uses some hints in supporting that the story is just fabrication of his conscious mind and he says directly that events are “all invented, basely, by me alone with the help of no one” and through this he aims to reveal himself as an unaided narrator and sole power, but it is not so in truth because there are lots of moments that he complains about predetermined principles and past-time memories that are meddling in his narration: “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me
By examining the narrator’s threshold position (Derrida’s tympanum) and the binary of self-orientation and predetermination, one is able to see how the predicament of the narrator embodies the role of the citizen in the panopticon as conceptualized by Michel Foucault

Summary

Introduction

The Unnamable is the tail entry in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. What is experienced in this novel seems to be the enigmatic description of incessant talker under the circumstance of investigation and harsh persecution. By deploying certain conventions of interrogation from the pulpy ‘secret agent’ and crime genres, it describes a panoptic society from the perspective of novel’s victim, who serves as the unnamable and unknowable center of a totalizing oppression In this way, the narrator’s creation of (potentially) alternate identities and allusions to previous Beckett novels can be read as an attempt to escape from the constraints of the novel (and the all-seeing eye of the reader) by utilizing the liminal role of the narratorial voice to ‘teleport’ (for lack of a better word) his agency beyond the limits of societally (and generically) imposed restrictions. The study underlines subjects such as unusual narrator’s threshold position, narrator’s lingual games, predetermined principles and the concept of panopticon in the Secret Agent Society of the narrative

Unusual narrator’s threshold position

Threshold position via lingual games

Conclusion