The Unnamable

Description

The third of Beckett's post-war novels, after Molloy and Malone Dies, The Unnamable was first published in French, and in Beckett's English in 1958. 'Like a great horned owl in an aviary', the unnamable narrator - so named because he knows not who he may be - sits nowhere and speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones do not fool me') as so many diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. As with the earlier novels, the prose has its own indomitable precisions, its afflicted but desirous reasons for being.

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War II. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.