Point of View

The Unnamable is written from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator who exists in an unspecified location. It mostly takes the form of a loosely structured monologue, with long stretches of continuous text that lack paragraph breaks. While this style of perspective is in line with the novel’s predecessors, Molloy and Malone Dies, what distinguishes The Unnamable is that the narrator’s point of view is infringed upon by other characters, namely Mahood. Lacking a personal history of his own, the narrator tells stories that were put into his head by Mahood, as if they were the narrator’s own memories. Even though these stories are told to him, he relays them in first-person, as if they happened to him. Consequently, the narrator’s use of pronouns is often jumbled and even arbitrary; when, for example, he talks of his time living in...