A return to the body : the failure of language and the dissolution of the self in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.

• Main Author: Tan, Benjamin Jonathan.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52231
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The narrators in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy obliterate the idea that language is a stable tool for thought, reason and communication. They express this failure of language in a variety of ways, which result in grave implications for the prospects of understanding the world and everything therein. This study interrogates this failure of language and meaning in the Beckett trilogy. Since it is with words that we think and therefore am, this paper examines how our conception of self-hood is in danger of being fragmented and dissolved in the light of the failure of language. Instead of revelling in "abject meaninglessness" or "play", I argue that the only way the first-person narrators can escape linguistic dissolution is to pull themselves out from the language matrix and return to a focus on the body (or to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term, “Leib”, that is to say, the lived body). This study therefore returns the human subject to the centre of his perceptual world, and demonstrates how his body is the very foundation of human experience.