SOURCE: Katz, Daniel. “Beckett's Measures: Principles of Pleasure in Molloy and First Love. Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 2 (summer 2003): 246-60.

In the following essay, Katz discusses Beckett's Molloy and First Love.

Toward the beginning of the first part of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Molloy utters the following words concerning the object of his endless discourse: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?” (Three Novels 36). This passage is one of the very many in Beckett in which life, or at least a particular life, is seen as so utterly given over to stasis and the death drive, so entirely dominated by a closed circle of potential permutations of behavior, sentiment, ratiocination, and expression...