Underscores become Bullets: From Beckett's "The Unnamable"

  • I'll sham dead now, whom they couldn't bring to life, and my monster's carapace will rot off me. But it's entirely a matter of voices,  no other metaphor is appropriate. They've blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it's them I hear
  • I won't say it, I can't say it, I have no language but theirs, . . .
  • This is the kind of language I can almost understand, these the kind of clear and simple notions on which it is possible for me to build, I ask for no other spiritual nourishment. A turnip, I know roughly what a turnip is like, a carrot too, particularly the Flakkee, or Colmar Red
  • the soul being notoriously immune from deterioration and dismemberment
  • I have to puke my heart out too, spew it up whole along with the rest of the vomit, it's then at last I'll look as if I mean what I'm saying, it won't be just idle words
  • The galley-man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules, who drops his sweep under cover of night and crawls between the thwarts, towards the rising sun, unseen by the guard, praying for storm
  • Pupil Mahood, repeat after me, Man is a higher mammal
  • But it's time I gave this solitary a name, nothing doing without proper names. I therefore baptise him Worm
  • I can hear him yet, faithful, begging me to still this dead tongue of the living
  • That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason
  • I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry
  • the setting sun whose last rays, raking the street from end to end, lend to my cenotaph and interminable shadow, astraddle of the gutter and the sidewalk
  • And often I went on looking without flinching until, ceasing to be, I ceased to see

Comments

Paul Oliverio said…
If there is a solution to mortality–and all of Beckett's work from beginning to end is concerned with hunting for such a solution–it lies not in "transcending" death, but in discovering a dimension of life which reduces death to an inane irrelevance. (p.7) RICHARD N. COE
"Samuel Beckett"
Grove Press
First Evergreen
Black Cat Edition (1970)

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