The Man

The man, from "Company," is the closest to a real character that Beckett provides in "Nohow On." Here, the man has a past, memories, and is in a space. While these are all, to some extent, undefined, they are nevertheless markers of a character, such as the fiction reader has come to expect. The man is defined by his past, with his mother, the day of his birth (apparently also the day of Beckett's birth, leading to a conflation of the man and the author), a meeting with his lover, and other such moments from childhood and youth. Nevertheless, in the "present," the man lies on his back in a dark room and listens to a voice narrating his movements, as well as his past. The addressee of the voice is unclear to the man, who imagines that there may be another hearer, and tries to give...