Preface

Molloy is Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s and early 1950s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

The tale of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a double plot involving the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent to search him out, whose own deterioration during the quest shadows that of the hero.Above all, the eponymous narrator of Molloy calls into being a world and its tribulations at the end of a pencil, with finicking and irresistible certainty, while trading larger uncertainties with the reader.