How It Is by Samuel Beckett

First published:Comment c’est, 1961 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Existential allegory

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: A wasteland of mud

Principal Characters:

• Bom, the narrator, a wanderer across a surrealistic landscape of slime
• Pim, the narrator’s companion during the middle third of the novel

The Novel

How It Is chronicles a journey which is, for the most part, maddeningly static. The tale is told in first person by the protagonist, who is crawling through the mud. He moves an arm, then a leg. He pushes, pulls, and laboriously progresses ten or fifteen yards. Over his shoulder he carries a sack, which he must constantly shift and rearrange. In the sack are tins, or cans, the contents of which he does not describe.

The setting is nightmarish. The entire terrain is mud, and the duration of the action is unmeasurable. The narrator speaks not in sentences but in fragments. Many of these fragments are repeated throughout the text, as if to give the impression that the journey keeps bending back upon itself. Other details combine to make the journey seem like frustrating dreams that all readers have experienced. The narrator is constantly aware of the vast stretch of time, which by implication dwarfs all of his efforts. He inserts the Latin term quaqua (in all directions) at various syntactical positions in his monologue, suggesting that these efforts are dispersed almost as soon as they are made.

The narrator struggles to complete an act in some satisfactory manner, but every action is frustratingly laborious: shifting the sack from one side to the other, loosening the cord at the mouth of the sack, reaching deep into the sack for a tin, finding an opener for the tin. Then he drops the opener into the mud and thrashes about in search of it. Periodically, he vomits and defecates into the mire; perhaps his vomit and excrement are the sources of the mire.

There is, however, a progression to the narrative. The protagonist is seeking after Pim, and this quest gives the novel its three formal divisions: the time before Pim, the time with Pim, and the time after Pim. The time before Pim has overtones of infancy and childhood. The protagonist has several fleeting memories of his mother. She is huge, because he is so small, and she offers him a love that is severe. She drones a snatch of the Apostles’ Creed. Next comes the memory of a redheaded, pudding-faced girl with a protruding belly; under an April or May sky, she and the protagonist cross pastures hand in hand until the pair disappear from view. These images come and go quickly, providing the traveler with only a brief respite from his squalid trek.

In part 2, the narrator finds Pim. He also acquires a name, observing that Pim has chosen to call him Bom. Pim, holding a sack of his own, is lying face down in the mud. Bom throws his right leg across the other man’s legs and pinions him. Pim is unresponsive; if he attempts to speak, his mouth fills with mud. Bom claws Pim’s armpits with his fingernails. He thumps Pim on the skull. He fishes out the opener and stabs Pim in the buttock. He pounds Pim’s kidney as with a pestle. Pim finally responds with a song, presumably wordless. Bom attempts to identify with Pim, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to determine who is doing what to whom.

The narrator is abandoned by Pim in part 3 and is again alone. In this final section of the novel, the narrator becomes ruminative and discursive. He describes life’s journey as a closed curve having four parts: First, the traveler seeks a victim; second, he finds and torments a victim; third, he loses his victim; fourth, he becomes a victim himself. Yet, since every traveler is both the seeker and the sought, the tormentor and the victim, parts 2 and 4 are actually the same part—thus, the tripartite structure of the novel.

Finally, the narrator shakes the reader’s confidence in everything that has gone before. He denies the authenticity of the journey and of its formulation in part 3. He concludes that it was “all balls from start to finish.”

The Characters

The characterization in How It Is is as circular as the plot. The narrator is Bom, the protagonist. Pim, the antagonist, is Bom’s alter ego, his Doppelganger. Perhaps they have no separate identities at all. In part 2, the narrator occasionally calls them Kram and Krim, as if to demonstrate how little of the self is revealed by arbitrary designations.

In a way, Bom embarks upon a very familiar literary journey. “Life” is surely the antecedent of the “It” in the title, so Bom is making the archetypal journey from the womb to the tomb. Indeed, he states repeatedly and overtly that his life is the thing under discussion. On several occasions in part 1, Bom assumes the fetal position, his knees drawn up, his back bent in a hoop. At this point in the narrative, the sack—an ambiguous symbol throughout—reinforces the womb motif.

Yet Bom’s journey through life is markedly unlike that of Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for example. Whereas the traditional symbolic journey is from dawn to sunset, from east to west, Bom travels, rather perversely, from left to right, from west to east. The reversed direction underscores the futility of the quest. The setting is a landscape of the mind. It is reminiscent of Dante’s terrain in the third circle of the Inferno, thus suggesting that consciousness is a kind of Hell. Bom’s consistently scatological description of his journey emphasizes the perceived nastiness of physical experience: He is obsessed with the “arse,” both Pim’s and his own, and in describing his birth, he states that he was “shat” into the world.

Bom and Pim are, in the final analysis, representative characters. They are Everyman and his elusive sense of selfhood. Some critics have described the travels of Bom and Pim as a movement from macrocosm to microcosm, a journey toward the core of consciousness. The sacks that the characters wear around their necks hold the tins that, in turn, hold the meaning of existence. Yet Bom (consciousness) must fumble about deep in his sack, in search of the proper tin. Then he must find the opener with which he can unlock Pim’s inner being (the self). This effort is constantly frustrated, and the implication of the journey as it is described is that the effort never can succeed.

The relationship between the characters Bom and Pim is succinctly expressed in part 3: They are “always two strangers uniting in the interests of torment.”

Critical Context

How It Is, Beckett’s sixth novel and his fourth written originally in French, continues to develop his central theme of the meaninglessness of existence. Its initial publication in 1961, however, seemed to evidence some literary meaning since it, in part, occasioned the awarding of the International Publishers Prize to the author in that same year. The ten-thousand-dollar prize, which Beckett shared with Jorge Luis Borges, was for the body of his work, but How It Is was cited particularly, along with the novels Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies, 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1958).

Beckett is perhaps even better known as a dramatist, as a leading member of the Theater of the Absurd. In plays such as En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) and Fin de partie (1957; Endgame, 1958), the denuded settings and laconic characters seem to be leading the drama toward silence. Certain critics insist that some hope can be found behind Beckett’s black despair. Yet they are inevitably forced to use tenuous arguments—for example, that the very act of writing a novel or play is a refutation of total nihilism.

Throughout Beckett’s career, stream of consciousness has been his habitual literary form. In the 1930’s, he took dictation from a fellow Dubliner, the nearly blind James Joyce, and copied out parts of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Though the stream-of-consciousness technique may have derived from Joyce, Beckett’s style is unmistakably his own. In How It Is, he takes Macbeth’s observation that life “is a tale told by an idiot...signifying nothing” to its ultimate, disturbing conclusion.

Bibliography

Abbot, H. Porter. “Other Worlds: The Artist as Planetary Engineer,” in The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect, 1973.

Barnard, C.J. “The Thing Itself,” in Samuel Beckett, A New Approach: A Study of the Novels and Plays, 1970.

Bree, Germaine. “The Strange World of Beckett’s Grands Articules,” in Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to His Novels, Poetry, and Plays, 1970. Edited by Melvin J. Friedman.

Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973.

Rosen, Steven J. “Against Consolation,” in Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition, 1976.