III. An aspect of Schopenhauer’s World as Representation in Beckett’s I in The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

“Wake up, my friend, and leave childish things behind!” – Schopenhauer’s quote of La Nouvelle Heloise, V. I at the beginning of The World as Will and Representation (“WWR”), Volume I, First Book – for WWR I use the edited and translated version by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.

I began going through Schopenhauer’s work and taking notes relevant to I of the The Unnamable – but the project overwhelmed me, I might as well have copied all of Schopenhauer, both volumes of WWR and his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (“OTFROTPOSR”). I put my work aside, thought it an impossible undertaking. I return to it to note a few comments. As noted in regard to the Schopenhauer Log, I hope that the Log as a whole builds on itself and reveals more than any individual post.

As with the Schopenhauer Log itself – Schopenhauer as a place to stand, to start, to jump off from and expand beyond Schopenhauer – here Schopenhauer as a place to stand, as a jumping off place, helps to understand the nature of I in The Unnamable, helps to see how Beckett himself might have (or might not have) used Schopenhauer and expanded beyond Schopenhauer to know and to formulate I.

As noted in the Introduction post, in the first paragraph of WWR, Book One, Schopenhauer writes: “‘The world is my representation’: — this holds true for ever living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation, that is, exclusively in relation to something else, the representing being that he himself is.” (23)

Later, in Book Three, Schopenhauer notes that time, space and causality are the structure of our intellect, and “The view of things made possible by (and according to) this structure is immanent; on the other hand, the view that becomes aware of its own condition is the transcendental.” (195) There is in these words, and in the Schopenhauer quotes above, an embryo of two kind of I’s, more particularly, in the latter, of an I that “becomes aware of its own condition,” an I who understands, at last, “that he is not acquainted with the sun or earth but only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation….” And yet, the first kind of I is an I in service of the will, buried in a body, and is ever present – both I’s might be said to be ever present. Beckett’s innovation was to recognize two separate I’s, and to shift, in his prose, the center, the I, to the latter kind of I, who, besides the rest, looks on the other I, the embodied I moving about in a world. This shift results in a completely new way of seeing, and in illuminating the world in a new light.

Beckett’s I is different from the Proustian-like “moments” of Schopenhauer’s Book Three of WWR. In Book Three, Schopenhauer has an idea that one can escape a mind which creates an entire complex, a world in time, space and causality, a mind that serves the will, only in moments that constitutes the experience which might be called aesthetic pleasure. In such moments, “cognition tears itself free from the service of the will so that the subject ceases to be merely individual and now becomes the pure, will-less subject of cognition, no longer concerned with relations following the principle of sufficient reason but instead resting and becoming absorbed in a steady contemplation of the object presented…” (200, 201) In this state, “we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e., we forget our individuality, our will…” (201) “We devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present, a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be…” (201)

And yet, Schopenhauer goes on to state that “anyone who has become so engrossed and lost in the intuition of nature that he continues to exist only as the pure, cognitive subject will thus be immediately aware that as such he is the condition, which is to say the bearer of the world of all objective being….” (203, 204) This latter awareness is closer to Beckett’s I, to what Beckett’s I has become, how he was born, how he lives. It is an experience – an experience like this – brought to awareness, and so to knowledge, so I is born, I becomes the I who has always been there. I note that it is in prose, in Beckett’s prose, that Beckett can most fully explore this I (i.e., without a body on stage), why Beckett’s prose is (perhaps) his most important work.

To turn from the Proustian-like moment, to grasp a bit of what Beckett’s I in The Unnamable might experience, and so from experience to concept know, we might return to Schopenhauer’s OTFROTPOSR, or to WWR Book One on representation. I note that Beckett’s I is alive, he is not born of philosophy or concepts, is not a concept, is experiencing a way of being that is real and a predicament not only of I’s but of human life.

When an I has experienced a feeling that the world is unreal, that even his body is not his, and when this knowledge comes to conscious awareness, I is aware that he is looking on, I comes into being. In the first class of objects for the subject in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer states that our understanding forms a union combining heterogenous forms of sensibility (including forms of time, space, and causality – each a product of a mind) into a complex, a totality of representations. In this complex this entire objective real world exists for us. One has formed the world, and the world exists in whole in each person, created by that person, mere appearance, a mere representation of objects and things but not essence, not “the thing in itself.” Schopenhauer states in WWR, Book One, that readers having grasped the four classes of the principle of sufficient reason will be convinced that the past and future are as unreal as any dream. He notes that the view is ancient – Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, age-old wisdom of India, Maya, the veil of deception, etc. (28) As noted, Beckett shifts the I itself, the center, to this view, the way of being that exists and is like looking on, wondering, doubting – seeing, experiencing aporia, as if outside of time, outside space, not embodied and yet an individual, filled with will, desire, doubt, the experience of an I.

I note, Schopenhauer states in a footnote of Book Four of WWR, in an attempt to help clarify, he says, the fact that the individual is only appearance, not thing in itself, how absolutely impossible it is, he says, to be aware of ourselves in ourselves independent of the objects of cognition and willing: “Rather, as soon as we try for once to understand ourselves and to do so by turning in on ourselves and directing our cognition inwardly, we lose ourselves in a bottomless voice and find ourselves like hollow, transparent spheres from whose void a voice is speaking, while the cause of it is not to be found within, and in wanting to grasp ourselves we shudder as we catch nothing but an insubstantial phantom.” (304) This sounds a lot like the unnamable I. But for me – this I is aware of so much, he has come to know he is not acquainted with the sky or earth, but merely with an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth.

II. Plot. The Outrageous Unnamables: H.P. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable/Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

Beckett’s prose work is often, perhaps always, embedded in a story or painting or musical piece (or even a genre) in a kind of “over-arching” way: his work is an innovative “comment” on art itself, on art as it must be or must “come to be” in his time. For instance, How It Is would seem to be not only embedded in the epic form, but a comment on the epic given the modern world; Texts for Nothing is a lonely song of an I on a ghost-like journey in the night I embedded in Schubert’s Winterreise (as discussed in posts on Texts for Nothing); his short story The Calmative is embedded, I believe, in the idea of an Arthurian knight’s adventure (take the adventure/return), in which the start is a man in bed, the return is to the man still in bed, the adventure a story in his mind. These parallels in Beckett’s work can be subtle and hard to spot, so subtle, perhaps, that in the case of Beckett’s The Unnamable we would be lost on this point – on its being “embedded in” Lovecraft’s The Unnamable – if Beckett had not given us a clue in the title (and even then…).

It is necessary, as a preliminary matter, in order to recognize the plot to see and recognize the strange nature of “I” in Beckett’s The Unnamable in order to separate I from “they” and “he” (or named others), which even when one follows the weird nature of “I” is difficult to do, as I blends (and parts) with he and others. If one tries to “attach” I to a body, to any named being, such as Mahood, or to a character in Mahood’s stories, one will lose track of I. However, once one teases out I and follows I in the text, the “plot” and its parallels and humorous resonances (and complex mirroring) to Lovecraft’s The Unnamable come alive (brilliantly).

Lovecraft’s The Unnamable: writer on a tomb. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable, Written in 1923, published in 1925, two men sit on a 17^th Century tomb speculating about ‘the unnamable.’ Carter narrates the story, tells “what happened.” Carter, a writer, tells us that he had made a remark about the “spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots [of a giant willow] must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth,” when his friend, Manton, chided him for such nonsense and told him that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. [Note that I as writer and narrator in Beckett’s The Unnamable mirrors Carter narrating the “tale,” but, more particularly, Mahood as writer mirrors Carter with Mahood’s purposely excessive language, his imaginative inventive nonsense.] Manton added that Carter’s “constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with [his] lowly standing as an author.” Carter, Manton says, was too fond of ending his stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed his heroes faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, Manton says, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore, he says, it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology – preferably those of Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply. Manton is a principal of a local high school, born and bred in Boston and “sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life.” [Note that Beckett’s I mirrors Manton – I naively believing Mahood’s story, as Manton struggles against Carter’s story, trying to refute the truth of the story even in the face of evidence. Manton also mirrors in Beckett’s The Unnamable the ordinary man who thinks he knows the plan and structure of the world, whose “words” join the crowd of voices who teach and proclaim and insist on known ‘truths.’] It was Manton’s view, Carter says, that “only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs.” Manton especially objected to Carter’s preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than Carter, Carter tells us, Manton would not admit that it was sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. Manton ruled out of court all that could not be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing could be really ‘unnamable.” It didn’t sound sensible to him.

Beckett’s The Unnamable set-up: writer in the dark. Beckett’s The Unnamable, written in 1949, published in 1953, the narrator “I” is not only “a writer/author,” but the unnamable himself, who, like the arguing Carter and Manton, enters upon and engages in dialectic arguments with “others” (some of whom are aspects of “himself” but still “not-I), “others” including the words themselves, who, as inverse to Carter trying to convince Manton that the unnamable exists, try to convince him that he is a man (horror!) living a life on earth, above in the light, and that he has been born. But I – in a cave-like darkness, in the predicament of knowing nothing, but having to speak of himself, having, presumably the task of telling his story (“It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time.” (297)), not believing even words are his (“Nothing then but me, of which I know nothing, except that I have never uttered, and this black, of which I know nothing either, except that it is black, and empty.” (298)) – still, I gullible, in part (like Manton, a bit superstitious), wants to believe in the arguments/stories of Mahood and “others.” But I, unlike Manton, ultimately fails to believe.

Lovecraft: the argument. Although Carter realizes the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of “an orthodox sun-dweller,” he begins his counter-attack, for he knew that Manton half clung to old superstitions, beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. Carter tells Manton that, because of these superstitions, he must have a faith in spectral substances on the earth – Manton’s superstitions argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions. Carter states: for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible “unbodied intelligence of generations.” And since spirit, he goes on, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why should it be extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes – or absences of shapes – which must for human spectators be “utterly and appallingly ‘unnamable’?” They argue as twilight approaches, Manton remaining unimpressed by Carter’s arguments and eager to refute them.

Lovecraft: evidence. Dusk falls. After Manton had finished his scoffing about ‘the unnamable,’ Carter tells him of the “awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.” Carter’s “story,” appearing in a magazine, is, according to Carter, based on true accounts about the unnamable, even if critics stated, besides the rest, that Cotton Mather had indeed told of a thing as being born in his Magnalia Christi Americana (“the thing with the blemished eye”), but nobody, they said, but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later. But Carter tells Manton he found an old diary unearthed among family papers (which, besides the rest, told of a “blemished eye seen at windows in the night”), and the “reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary described.” Carter also tells of a boy who entered an abandoned house and went mad, and of the long whispered lock on the door to attic stairs of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by a grave (and of the sightings of a “nameless thing”). No one unlocked the door when the old man died. Manton grows quiet, and Carter notes that his words had impressed him. Manton asks about the boy, the boy of Carter’s “story.” Carter tells him that the boy had gone to the deserted house to look at the windows in the attic, and had come back screaming maniacally. Manton thinks about this, but returns that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamableor scientifically indescribable. Carter adds more evidence: further revelations collected among the old people, apparitions, etc. It had grown very late – and Manton now seems to come around in the dark, given especially that the abandoned house is right in front of them and that they sit on a grave stone. Carter continues with his first-hand evidence: he had gone to the attic and found bones, a skull with four-inch horns but otherwise human. Manton asks about the window panes, which were all broken. Manton asks to see the house. They hear a creaking sound – the opening of the broken frame of the window of the abandoned house, there is a rush of noxious air, a shriek; they are knocked from the tombstone. When they open their eyes, they are side by side in a hospital. They had been found at noon in a field, a mile from the old burying-ground, on a “spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood.” The words of Carter’s story ends with Manton’s words: “it was the unnamable!”

The PLOT. Beckett’s The Unnamable. Argument and Refutation and Failure

Set up and structure. See above, writer in the dark. Note the comparison of these two texts would benefit from a long paper, perhaps it exists. (For instance, to delve into parallels involving the “blemished eye,” or into the meaning of the use of extravagant words, language.)

I’s predicament and argument. “I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak.” (308). We are launched, somehow, through I, into Mahood’s stories. “Here, in my domain, what is Mahood doing in my domain, and how does he get here?” Mahood tries to convince I that these stories are about I, that Mahood and I are, in fact, the same I. Something is required of I. Like Manton, I almost believes. He wonders if he should admit that he is Mahood after all and that “these stories of a being whose identity he usurps, and whose voice he prevents from being heard, all lies from beginning to end?” (305). I wonders about Mahood: “What if we were one and the same after all, as he affirms, and I deny? And I have been in the places where he says I have been, instead of having stayed on here, trying to take advantage of his absence to unravel my tangle?

Notes and Digressions. Words, Mahood, Worm – they try to convince I that he is among the living. “A real little terrestrial! Choking in the chlorophyll! Hugging the slaughter-house walls!” (309, 310). Note: in The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, Johnson says, “there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome” – the idea or image of hugging walls comes up in Beckett’s work (see, for example, The Calmative “I hugged the walls, famished for shadow” or Texts for Nothing “It’s true you hid from them, hugged their walls.”) And of course: in Lovecraft’s The Unnamable, after the encounter with the unnamable, the characters are discovered in what was an ancient slaughterhouse. Beckett uses “slaughterhouse” or reference thereto numerous times in The Unnamable in description of ‘the world above’ among the living (i.e., among the dying). Note too: Mahood tells of men “among the living,” but Worm is an embryo, a being not yet born, who perhaps never does get born.

Mahood’s “argument” and I’s refutation. Mahood tells an absurd tale, saying it is of I himself, of I (a man) returning from a “a world tour” to his family, where I says to himself “Yonder is the nest you should never have left, there your dear absent ones are awaiting your return” etc. (311) His wife, in this tale, relates the man’s history to the children, I saying, “That’s one of Mahood’s favorite tricks, to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence.” (312) The story, ridiculous, boisterous, grotesque, is like an 18^th Century novel (very much in parallel to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentelmen), or in Rabelasian fashion, the whole family dying of sausage poisoning, the man himself (I) a creature revolving in the yard. This is laugh out loud funny, especially in the way I is drawn in, naïve, gullible (as ridiculous as the story is), almost believing like Manton in Lovecraft’s The Unnamable. I sorts out the evidence, but notes he must have remarked that he remained skeptical, for Mahood casually let fall that I was lacking not only a leg, but an arm also. This might have pushed I into believing that man was him. But Mahood’s suggestion that the misfortune experienced by I’s family had caused him to turn back, from “that moment on I ceased to go along with him.” (315) I gives analysis/argument why he is not the man in Mahood’s story. I says “enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here.” (317, 318) But Mahood tells another story, saying it is I: of a man in a jar, without arms or legs. There is a lot of detail, again I almost believes (“This story is not good, I’m beginning almost to believe it”). In fact, I is not these characters in Mahood’s stories. I is and remains in the predicament: “I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature I am.” (329) It is I’s pensum, he doesn’t know what the lesson is, or why there is a lesson. At last: “The stories of Mahood are ended. He has realized they could not be about me, he has abandoned, it is I who win, who tried so hard to lose in order to please him, and be left in peace.” (339) I doesn’t cry out in horror at the end “It is me – a man!” Unlike Manton who believes in the end, who cries out “It was the unnamable!” – I remains unconvinced.

Worm – argument and refutation. The words move to Worm, trying to convince I that he is Worm, a fetus like creature, and that Worm (or I) was born. “Now I seem to hear them say it is Worm’s voice beginning, I pass on the news, for what it is worth. Do they believe I believe it is I who am speaking?” (339) “Another trap to snap me up among the living.” (339) The trap is that Worm might have similarities to I himself. Worm’s “senses tell him nothing, nothing about himself, nothing about the rest, and this distinction is beyond him.” In fact, Worm is or may be in a womb, not yet born, not knowing anything. But unlike I, Worm does not know that there is anything to know. To the contrary, I knows there is nothing he can know. (340) Again, in the words, there is a long absurd back and forth of evidence and refutation, I ultimately fails to believe he is Worm and refutes the argument.

And finally, nothing but I himself, and not even that. The words turn to other evidence of I having lived, documents, photos, records. At last, I (or the words) speaks of himself, what he is, where he is. But like Carter, whom Manton says he was too fond of ending his stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed his heroes faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced – I’s novel ends as I is on the verge of telling his own story, but he cannot, the words themselves are not his. It is impossible – I can’t speak or tell of I.

I must still go on saying words until they “say me,” strange journey. Silent for a moment, I will go on, in Texts for Nothing for instance. I has the impossible task of being the unnamable, of living as the unnamable, of trying to believe, but failing to believe, he has been among the living. And yet in both Beckett’s and Lovecraft’s The Unnamable the characters have the task of trying to define, know, name that unnamable “thing,” which they cannot.

But in Beckett’s The Unnamable, that embodied worldly I, like those in Mahood’s stories, or Carter and Manton – those above, moving in the light under sun or moon, are in fact (in inverse to Lovecraft’s story) the strange alien creatures dying in the slaughterhouse.

I. An introduction (or an exercise in failing to introduce) the Innovative “I” in Beckett’s The Unnamable, by Pamela Dickson

‘The world is my representation’: — this holds true for every living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation, that is, exclusively in relation to something else, the representing being that he himself is. – If any a priori truth can be asserted, then this is it; for this truth expresses the form of all possible and conceivable experience.
The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1, First Book, Section 1, (first paragraph) Schopenhauer, edited and translated by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.

One might have a twofold existence: the I who is embodied, enslaved to the service of the will in Schopenhauer’s terms; the other I is the one who comes to understand that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth but rather only with an eye that sees the sun, with a hand that feels an earth. It is Beckett’s radical innovation to recognize this latter existence as a distinct and separate existence, and to shift the I to this existence. I note this I has a body by necessity, but perhaps it is utterly still, as if not there, not real.

The unnamable I of The Unnamable documents a life experience – in fictional terms, is an individual, a character. Beckett’s I, like Ahab, is the rare character who like a radical philosopher illuminates the world around him in a new light. I name the I of The Unnamable “I” for purposes of this discussion.

In the experience of life, there is or might be a self, as if a distinct self, looking on: looking on at a distance, looking on in a way that is distinct even in personality from the named self moving about in a world (i.e.,distinct from the engaged self who is immersed in all that is happening ‘out there’). I looks on as if separate from the body and named being in a world that I is apparently adhered to. Perhaps it can be said like this: in the long years of human work, human life reflected in words, the idea of “looking on,” the feeling of reflection or reflecting at a distance – perhaps it is Thoreau standing at lake, or the Stoic notion of judging fate swirling around one (the correct moral response to a threatening storm is to recognize that a storm and even death are indifferent) – is not new or even uncommon. Beckett’s innovation, as noted, one with an enormous expansion of insight, is to shift the “I” to the “one” who is looking on. Thus, I is not Thoreau standing at a lake, reflecting. I is (apparently, I wonders) an aspect of the body and life of Thoreau, peering on even at the life and body of Thoreau. I calls himself ‘I’ and looks. Thoreau’s experiences of being human might include I, but I as a separate being experiences and feels very differently from Thoreau. I might not even recognize Thoreau as himself (yes, the I of The Unnamable is a “him”), even if Thoreau claims, positively argues to the end, that “I is me, a truer me.” I doesn’t believe him. I experiences himself as separate from the life and body of Thoreau.

Understanding the nature of I is crucial to reading The Unnamable. That is, understanding the nature of I – his distinct existence – reveals, unveils aspects, one might say, of what can even be considered conventional aspects of the novel, the hilarious, outrageous nature of this novel. I will discuss this when discussing the plot – yes, there is a plot. The character ‘I’ is also, as noted, a revolutionary fictional technique, enabling one to see the nature of one who ‘looks on.’

In my experience, the more one (to say one) not only reflects on the part of oneself that seems to be looking on (in wonder in my case), as if at a distance from the passionate or banal, small or large events, being a body in a world, the more one not only reflects on the strange feeling of looking on, but even becomes I, dwells in I, lives as I looking on – shifts to being, living as I, immersing oneself in I, I’ll call her I. The more one immerses oneself in I the more one feels estranged from a world of phenomena, including the named creature I is attached to who is a body living a life “above,” who is in the world in the days experiencing time and space. Besides the rest, the more one is I, lives in or as I, the more questions arise. Nothing is clear. Everything becomes unclear. Nothing is even real (perhaps) or known or can help one know. It is unclear whether either I exists – I in the light or I in the dark – and if I in the dark exists, then where, and if not existing, whether I in the dark can die. In any event, I in the dark feels apart, a separate creature with different “life” dreams and goals, to call this life.

I is perhaps best illuminated by what he is not. He can see the man interacting in the world, a web of relations, moving and restless, one thing after another. But I is not that nature. I looks on. I might be closer to the Stoic view. The Stoics reflect on “what is not mine,” which includes, according to Epictetus, everything that others may say or do; everything that I have said and done in the past, as well as what troubles me because the thing is still to come; everything that happens to me, independently of my will, because of the body that surrounds me or my innate vital breath; everything which stirs the waves of the violent sea which bathes me. In I, being I, is an ever deeper reflection on and embodiment of “what is not mine” – the body, its hunger, thirst, desires, its voice, words, are not me, not mine.

In Jungian terms, the two, the I and the embodied I, might, perhaps, each have a distinct ego-consciousness and personality, and yet they are not Jung’s “dual personalities.” These two, in Beckett, are aspects of what is conventionally considered one ego, I believe; but in fact, if one dwells in I, one discovers I is a different being from the embodied I.

Perhaps this two-in-one seems like madness, or if not madness, on the road. Perhaps it is. The two-I’s-in-one is, perhaps, in part a kind of schizophrenic split due to a modern world. And yet, I believe the experience of I, the nature of I, is sanity, relief, an experience of one’s nature, an experience of a bit of reality – a reality one might linger with in The Unnamable, and other works of Beckett’s. Of course, this ‘I’ is in the background of many books of literature and philosophy. But in The Unnamable we delve into the experience of I himself, on his own terms, the life and travails of an I that is possibly (and impossibly) buried in ourselves, more deeply buried the more one fails to recognize I and take I out of the cave or prison of that self in a body in a world. I is born and comes to be in his own way, lives a unique existence, to call it living, and perhaps dies in his own way if he dies.