Mitchell

The object I will describe and attempt to contextualize is a sentence from Samuel Beckett’s novel, Molloy. The sentence was originally written in french using the latin alphabet and later translated into english by Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles in 1951. The sentence begins with the word “They,” followed sequentially by “looked alike.” A pause is then indicated by a comma and the rest of the sentence reads, “but no more than others do.”

The sentence comes at a point in the book when the central character, Molloy, is crouching behind a boulder on the side of a mountain watching two men (and a small dog) walking on the path below. The sentence is used amidst a description of the two men narrated by the author in a similar way to how I am narrating this description of the sentence that was used to describe the two men in the novel, Molloy, by Samuel Beckett.

The decision to use “…no more…” instead of “… not more…” seems a very deliberate and important decision in the making of the meaning of the sentence or, really, lack of definite meaning in the sentence. “Not” would create a sense of authority leaving it less open and more specific. “No” seems to open up the meaning. One could even consider the “t” in “not” pictorially, a kind of gate on the end of the word and on the meaning of the sentence.

The sentence is a contradiction. By saying “they looked alike,” but then implying they only looked alike as far as anyone looks like anyone else, indicating they could look nothing alike except for being human men. There is a certain kind of enigma or openness created in the space of the sentence because of this contradiction and the way in which it is written. This device Beckett uses, intentionally or not, intrigues me more than the content of the sentence (the bit about people looking alike). The sentence becomes more than just a part of a description and opens up a gap hidden inside the text, leaving the potential for infinite possibilities.