Summary

The opening lines of The Unnamable – the questions, “Where now? Who now? When now?” – set a precedent for the entire novel, which takes the form of a monologue filled with an unidentified narrator’s speculations about their “situation” (285). The narrator assumes that they have an identity, an “I,” but cannot be certain, going so far to claim that any supposition he makes about anything will be ridden with doubt and potentially contradiction. The speaker asserts that he is alone, but then insists on having “company,” and thus the novel’s predecessor Malone appears regularly (only from the “waist up”) in their mutual unidentified location, a place where “there are no days” (286-7). The narrator questions whether Malone could actually be Molloy, but concludes that he cannot know for sure, only that they all must have always been here, wherever “here,” is, sitting in one...