Point of View

Malone Dies switches back and forth between two perspectives: the first-person monologue from the viewpoint of an old man named Malone, who narrates his thoughts and reflections related to his impending death while he is bed-ridden, and third-person narration that Malone takes up when he tells Sapo and Macmann’s stories. Malone writes his stories in an exercise-book with a pencil that is rapidly diminishing in size, and it is implied through the way the two perspectives fuse on the page, that his monologue is been written down in the same notebook as well. Like his predecessor Molloy, Malone is an unreliable narrator – he expresses what should be tangible events or facts with such uncertainty that the reader cannot be sure that any of the “plot” information he relays to the reader is true. This is most apparent in his reluctant method of storytelling – Malone...