Murphy by Samuel Beckett

First published: 1938

Type of work: Absurdist narrative

Time of work: The undefined present (c. 1938)

Locale: Dublin, London, and between these two cities

Principal Characters:

• Murphy, the protagonist, an out-of-work drifter
• Celia, a prostitute in love with Murphy
• Neary, his former tutor, seeking him in London
• Miss Counihan, engaged to Murphy in Dublin
• Cooper, employed by Neary to find Murphy
• Wylie, who is wooing Miss Counihan

The Novel

To describe “what happens” in this novel is to describe the attempts of the protagonist to avoid having anything happen at all, and the attempts on the part of the other characters to make something happen to Murphy. Murphy lives by the principle of least activity; his greatest ambition is to tie himself to his beloved teakwood rocker and rock himself into a state of blissful nonbeing, a retreat in which the body is vacated in order to free the mind for endless roamings in the actual and virtual. Taking his cue from Belaqua, the Dantean figure punished in Purgatory for indifferent procrastination, Murphy tries to do nothing but inevitably does something despite his best efforts: He dies.

Stated baldly, however, the “plot” is simple: Murphy, engaged to Miss Counihan, goes from Dublin to London, ostensibly to set himself up in a lucrative occupation. After too long an absence, Miss Counihan and her new lover, Neary (Murphy’s former tutor), hire the dull-witted Cooper to find Murphy, prove either his death or infidelity, and report back. Murphy has meanwhile fallen in love (if that is the word) with Celia, a sensitive and long-suffering prostitute who begs him to find honest work. Murphy’s avoidance of commitment carries the novel through half its length, before Murphy stumbles on a position at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, as a night attendant. Having finally found kindred spirits, “the race of people he had long since despaired of finding,” Murphy deserts Celia. When Cooper, Neary, and Miss Counihan, joined by yet another lover, Wylie, finally move in with Celia to wait for Murphy’s return, the novel moves to its absurd climax and ending, in which Murphy is accidentally burned to death when someone turns on the gas to his room instead of flushing the toilet. Cooper has only to get rid of the cremated remains of Murphy, which he does in a barroom brawl that leaves them spilled among “the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.” The narration moves back and forth from chapter to chapter, between Murphy and his situation with Celia, and the Neary/Counihan/Cooper campaign to find him. The Murphy/Celia chapters are more internal, more analytic from moment to moment, while the “action” chapters are full of discourse, pithy sentences, and an economy of expression.

The Characters

Beckett sets aside a whole chapter to describe Murphy’s “mind,” which “pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without.” As for his body, Murphy is not in the best of health; more specifically, he gets winded easily and walks with considerable deliberation. Most important, Murphy seeks repose in the mid-distance between the mind and the body, where neither aggravates the other. In the endless struggle between the two, Murphy has sought to call a truce. The other characters insist that mind and body must struggle eternally, and will not leave Murphy alone. In one of the most telling conversations between Celia and Murphy, Murphy tells her, “of you, mind, and body, one must go, or two, or all.”

To understand the “character” of Murphy fully, one must set aside preconceived notions of psychological characterization constructed by an author and given life through the reader’s observations of the character in action, aided by an omniscient narrator. One critic refers to the novel as a sort of “reader-participation” novel, in that the clues to plot and character are disguised as seemingly irrelevant and arbitrary bits of information spilled onto the page as the narrator rushes through the text. Finally, Murphy is not so much a character as an embodiment of an idea, the idea of Beckett’s perceptions of the world—namely, that it is an unfortunate affliction to be born and that the implications of having been born are to be avoided wherever possible. While the other characters act with some attention to cause and effect, Murphy avoids effect by avoiding cause, steering clear of all decisions until they are forced upon him. However difficult this notion may seem to the reader, it is essential to the understanding of what Beckett is trying to do with this novel: present the notion of a man “without action.” Similar to other novels of the modernistic period (by James Joyce and Robert Musil, for example), Murphy is not “about” something so much as it is that something itself.

Of the other characters, the reader is most likely to sympathize with Celia, who loves Murphy in a way that he could never comprehend, but does so without the cloying, overpossessive love that is normally associated with this kind of relationship. Her only demand is that Murphy find a job in order to keep her off the streets. When he fails even to try to do so, she finally returns to a life of prostitution, and when he does find a job, he deserts her. The passage describing Celia slowly climbing the stairs, knowing Murphy is gone for good, is one of the most poignant in all of Beckett’s writing. Beckett gives her the final scene of the novel as well, when, in an act of mercy and compassion so typical of Celia’s character, she saves a wheelchair victim from drowning in a pond. Unlike the ultimately tragic case of Murphy, here Celia manages to save someone from self-destruction through inaction.

The basically comic quartet of Neary, Miss Counihan, Cooper, and Wylie offer something more than simple relief from the ennui of the main plot. They collectively represent the whirl of action, often pointless and directionless action, that drives the common man forward in every bit as absurd and meaningless a way as Murphy’s way, but with the illusion of design and purpose. Neary, tutor of one idea only (“Murphy, all life is figure and ground”), nevertheless disguises that idea in metaphor after metaphor. Miss Counihan is basically a parody of Irish propriety disguising Irish lustiness. Cooper, ever moving but eternally doomed to find himself in a tavern having forgotten his mission, is a physicalization of all pointless perambulation and quest. Wylie, besides serving Miss Counihan more admirably than Murphy, is Neary’s foil, relentlessly attentive yet hopelessly unobservant. Taken together, the four characters in search of Murphy give the reader a sense of journey without messiah, a forlornness and despair in their search not unlike the existential conclusion to all consciousness.

Critical Context

Following More Pricks than Kicks (1933), the publication of Murphy in English in 1938 signaled the maturing voice of one of Ireland’s greatest writers. This novel foreshadows Beckett’s great dramatic work, including Waiting for Godot, Endgame (1957), Happy Days (1961), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and others, written for the stage, radio, television, and film. It stands as one of the central works of the period that produced Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and the best work of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. In a time of experimentation with form, from which the term “postmodern” would eventually emerge, Murphy is second in Beckett’s prose work only to the trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). Sophisticated both in its referents and in its form, deeply philosophical yet wildly entertaining to the informed reader, Murphy deserves a place as a milestone on the journey of the novel to its present state.

Bibliography

Alvarez, A. Samuel Beckett, 1973.

Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett, 1974.

Fletcher, John. The Novels of Samuel Beckett, 1964.

Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: Theater, Prose, and Drama of Samuel Beckett, 1977.

Robinson, Michael. The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett, 1969.