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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Moran say is the defining feature of Bally?

2. What does Moran say the term “Ballybaba” describes?

3. When did Gaber tell Moran he would be leaving?

4. What kind of noise did Moran hear from his son’s room before he woke him?

5. What did Moran send his son to buy in the town of Hole?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Moran characterize the scene that led up to his departure with his son?

2. How does Moran characterize the process of dying?

3. What does Moran say are topics that never crossed his mind?

4. How does Moran characterize the system by which messengers carried their messages to agents?

5. How does Moran characterize his trip to the garden before his departure?

6. How does Moran’s report end, at the end of Part II?

7. How did it come to pass that Moran killed the man?

8. What was Moran’s reaction when he received the orders from Gaber?

9. What justification does Moran offer for why he accepted the job from Gaber?

10. How does Part II open?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Molloy is a book in which Beckett has created a world for his character to live in, but it is a world that only sometimes resembles our world of experiences and observations. What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating a whole world for a character, with rules that apply only to that world, and are not even always explained? Is this an ultimately fruitful enterprise for Beckett, or does the artificiality of the enterprise work against him? Take a position on one side or the other.

Essay Topic 2

How does the narrator of Molloy know things, and what complicates the act or the sensation of knowing? What does it mean to him, to know or not know? What kind of world does he live in, where knowing is subject to so many uncertainties?

Essay Topic 3

What are the advantages and disadvantages of living the way Molloy lives, naïve, ignorant, alert, self-critical? What does Beckett tell us about our own lives, by writing such an odd character? Is he an everyman, or a freak? Is he telling us important things we ought to know about ourselves, or is he warning us against the intellectual and spiritual processes that led him to be the person he is? Is he just an oddity, or a philosophically serious character, showing us something we do not see often?

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