After the final no

This study, while surveying all of Samuel Beckett's major fiction, focuses on the work that he regarded as his masterpiece: the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. It analyzes the ways in which Beckett, as he moves from one novel to the next, demystifies each of the principal idols to which human beings have looked for protection and guidance in the successive phases of their history. In part one of Molloy this role is assumed by the figure of the mother and the various women who minister to Molloy's needs in the course of his journey. In part two, these maternal figures…