I Can't Remember, Therefore I Am Not

Though we discussed a myriad of possibilities as to the central themes of Molloy, the one that really stuck with me was the concept of unreliable memory. As anyone who has taken a Psychology 101 course knows, memory is a wildly flighty, somewhat untrustworthy mechanism of the brain. I think Beckett explores this throughout Malloy, commenting not only on how memory can act as fiction in general, but how even we, ourselves, can be fooled by our own memories.

Beckett introduces the slippery nature of memory on the very first page, when Molloy says to himself,

"The truth is I don't know much. For example my mother's death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she  only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don't know."

Molloy is dying, and yet the details of his life have seemingly slipped away. Or, at the very least, confused themselves with other details, thus erasing this man's very personality. If one cannot remember anything, what is it one can actually know? Molloy asks the same question on page eleven when he muses,

"A and C I never saw again. But perhaps I shall see them again. But shall I be able to recognize them? And am I sure I never saw them again? And what do I mean by seeing and seeing again?" 

As we noted in the first week after reading Imagination Dead Imagine, Beckett's writing has a way of capturing the seemingly un-capturable human psyche. In Molloy, Beckett's ability to capture the flickering quality of memory allows the reader to question what we know, how we know it, and how these two questions help us form.

(This was written a week ago, but for some reason, I forgot to publish it. Thus, it was merely a draft until right now. - Sept 19, 2012 3:17 pm.)