Absurdity Behind Death-An Interpretation Of Beckett's Malone Dies

Samuel Beckett is an great Irish novelist and playwright. Most of his works reflect the spiritual crisis of the western people before and after the second world war and his characters struggle in the meaningless and desperate world. His trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and the Unnamable represent his top novel achievement which has risen to the exploration into the absurd existence and the inner-self.This thesis begins its analysis, based on the existential critical theory, with the death theme through close reading of one of the trilogy—Malone Dies, then continues to focus on its structure, language and symbolic technique systematically, through which it can be found that Beckett is reflecting the absurdity and meaningless of life with irrational structure.There are six parts in this thesis.The first part is the introduction. This part introduces Beckett' s literature achievement and Malone Dies' main content. At the same time, the purpose and meaning of my choosing this topic is mentioned in the end.The second part produces the relative literature theory—the existential critical theory, and the theatre of absurd.The 3^rd ,4^th and 5^th parts are text-analysis partsThe third part analyzes the death theme of this novel in order to see the absurdity and meaningless of the human' s life. At first, death brings nothingness and the end of meanings; life under the stare of death becomes painful and desperate, with great tenor and anxiety; therefore, he wishes that the ultimate end could bring him hope and meaning and bring his pain to an end; however, hope will not come and nothing will come. All of the struggle will be futile and people' s pursue for better life is in vain. The novel' s absurdity and meaningless are based on western social background and people' s spiritual crisis.The fourth part analyzes Beckett' s anti-novel structure and language form. The circular structure and the stagnant situation in the novel imply life is but meaningless repetition, meaningless and unchangeable and there is no exit for humankind. From the beginning to the end, Malone (and Beckett who is behind Malone) always announces devalued language as a game, but not a serious expression and communication which is the denial of communication between people. The author uses repetition, ambiguity and other language forms such as the inconsequentially, self-contradiction and Collaterality to break the consistency of meaning, revealing the world is in fact so absurd, unknowable and not expressible by language.The fifth part emphasizes that Beckett uses the symbolic expressive means to reflect the reality. The name "Malone" can be understood as "man alone", referring to the isolated self. The hero Malone stays from the beginning to the end in a prison-like room, symbolizing the human self isolated from the outside world, without understanding or communication. Being deprived of parents' guidance and leading, without God in his world, modern people become completely isolated individual; The crucified Christ sheds light on the conditions of hostility between modern men; The characters without social or familial identities represent the whole human being who are in pain and desperation.The sixth part is the concluding remarks, which overlooks this novel from the macroscopic angle, including its significance in social and literature aspect as well as its limitation. As a masterpiece of Beckett, Malone dies successfully reflects the truth of social reality of the Western world after the World War II in the absurd artistic form. The novel has remarkable social significance. It strips the illusions about reality, awakens people to the maladies and depression of society. In this novel Beckett experiments with novel and makes use of anti-novel devices, widening the range of novel expression. But based on existentialist philosophy, Malone Dies is limited within the existentialist ideology, so it excessively emphasizes the expression of intuition and advocates to write in an irrational way so that the novel is folded with pessimism. It can realize the absurdity of life, but can not give the resolution, which is its deadly limitation.