As John Pilling and James Knowlson so famously referred to them, Samuel Beckett’s final trilogy of novellas compiled as Nohow On—Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), and Worstword Ho (1984)—are “frescoes of the skull”: Each contains little or no plot, action, or movement; the reader accesses each through a confined single narrator who ruminates on stories and endings. For these storytelling focalizers to play with language is both necessary and also futile, something that must be done yet cannot be done but must be done even though we know doing it never brings us to a sense of finality. In this sense, these three minimalist novellas both practice and comment upon one of Beckett’s greatest obsessions, one he announces boldly at the end of the three highly experimental works that he wrote painstakingly, pivoting between French and English, between 1951 and 1953 that critics refer to as his first “Trilogy” of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In fact, it was after writing this set of fiction that Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot (1953) as a comic diversion. The narrator of The Unnamable, as an unceasing interlocutor, identifies this obsession depicted in the early trilogy and mocked in Godot as a process of inquiry: What am I to do, What shall I do, What should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Importantly, this is a singular voice that parallels the self-reflexive narrators of the late novels. And, most significantly, the pattern or approach described as a mode of investigation or inquiry is the precise mode the final narrators follow as they ruminate on their lives and circumstances and await a tomorrow that may have no more tomorrows. By tracing the connection between this process of seemingly infinite regression as defined by The Unnamable’s narrator—possibly a bodiless being, a head sitting in a jar next to menu in a restaurant window—this paper hypothesizes that Company, the first novella of the final trilogy, shares a similar narrating process with The Unnamable. However, Company moves beyond the terse quips and parodic utterances of the middle period of Beckett’s life and, by focusing upon language’s ultimately ineffectiveness and also irreducibility, reveals Beckett at the height of his use of negative minimalist aesthetics as he resigns to failing with language and surrenders to death.
