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It has become a critical commonplace to read Beckett's novels as inquiries into the unstable nature of selfhood amidst 20th-century onslaughts on the notion of the self, whether ontological, historical, cultural, or epistemological. Yet this tendency takes the novelistic specificity of these works too much for granted. Why, we must still ask, did Beckett continue to write novels after his own literary corpus seemed to sound the form's death knell? And what questions might arise from reading the "novelness" of the prose works? Broadly speaking, what do they have to tell us about the work of fiction as such? More specifically, what may they tell us about this novelistic being at their center, the literary character? The overall trajectory of Beckett's narrative work suggests that he gradually dissolves and abandons traditional character, leaving behind those fictional semblances of people which are accountable for the illusion of talking, feeling, and being, in favor of texts which simply are, their utterances originating from no place, source, or body. As Maurice Blanchot, one of Beckett's greatest contemporary readers, asks in a review essay of The Unnamable (1953), "Where now? Who now?" (2003: 210). It is certainly no longer character that speaks in Beckett's work, Blanchot argues, and no longer the author either, but rather "a neutral speech that speaks itself alone" (213; see also Critchley). And indeed the radicalism of Beckett's later prose work is that he does strip the form of all its traditional illusions, including its actors and speakers, leaving simply words without source and voice without origin, the nameless and impersonal "voix narrative" that speaks whenever literary texts happen (Blanchot 1993: 379–87). But this is not to say that character, even in its seeming absence, was not still central to Beckett's novelistic practice.
This article argues that, especially in Molloy (1951), the first novel of his mid-century trilogy, Beckett explores what the novelistic character is and how it lives, just as he seems to be dismantling it entirely. Before the wholesale depersonalization of the novel described by Blanchot, which, I think, aptly characterizes Beckett's work after The Unnamable, in Molloy he conducts an inquiry into the mode of being of character. Molloy is both an apotheosis of all the characters...