9 - Malone Dies

Summary

For a dying man to write his memoirs seems, at first sight, a simple extension of a certain kind of literary memoir in which – from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) to Saul Bellow's Dangling Man (1944) ' the narrator gives an account of himself in an extreme state of isolation, talking to himself on the brink of the void. At the same time, the memoir will also be seen as an extension oi Molloy, taking the quest of that novel towards a physical and metaphoric conclusion. There is an affinity between the worlds of the two novels, over and above the specific signs that link Malone to Molloy: the large, hairy head, the hat with the string, while Macmann's possessions include a silver knife-rest – the object Molloy stole from Lousse. It is possible to visualise Malone as a Molloy-like figure diminished by extreme age (and he has been so presented in a dramatised version by the Irish actor Barry McGovern). Nevertheless, the scope and structure of this novel are quite different, beginning with its fundamental elimination of movement in space – of the epic voyage – and the placing of the ‘hero’ in complete confinement. (All we know is that he is in a room, in an ordinary house that sometimes sounds like an asylum.) Molloy as narrator is also confined and immobile, but his mobile memories still create the illusion of tramp-like wandering across a spacious mythic landscape.