Ill Seen Ill Said: Analysis of Major Characters
"Ill Seen Ill Said" is a contemplative work centered around an unnamed elderly woman living in isolation in a barren rural setting. As she confronts the realities of aging, her physical and mental decline becomes evident, characterized by her encroaching blindness and deteriorating cognitive abilities. Her daily existence revolves around basic activities, yet her apparent passivity is intertwined with a profound sense of introspection. The woman grapples with her inability to perceive the world accurately, leading her to question fundamental concepts like time, space, and dualities such as good and bad or reality and illusion.
This struggle for understanding is compounded by her isolation, as she contemplates the significance of these concepts in her past and their potential meaninglessness in her current state. Her thoughts often feel disjointed and aimless, reflecting a mind that cannot anchor itself to its surroundings or to coherent ideas. Ultimately, her existence is marked by a sense of waiting—waiting for death, without hope or connection to others. This exploration of isolation and the fragility of human perception prompts readers to consider the deeper implications of how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Ill Seen Ill Said: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Samuel Beckett
First published: Mal vu mal dit, 1981 (English translation, 1981)
Genre: Novel
Locale: An unspecified rural location
Plot: Antistory
Time: Unspecified
“She,” an unnamed old woman who lives alone in a stark, unspecified rural area at an indeterminate time. Her body is slowly decaying because of her advancing age, and she is going blind. She spends her days carrying out the most rudimentary of human activities: She does little more than eat, sleep, and stare. Despite or perhaps because of her encroaching blindness, she spends almost all of her time staring. She examines repeatedly the few, rustic items in her small cabin and the slight changes in the harsh, barren landscape surrounding that cabin. She cannot tell whether these changes actually occur or whether they happen because her sight is failing, because they are “ill seen.” Like her eyes and body, her mind also seems to be failing. She cannot remember the beginning of a thought when she arrives at its end, and her thoughts seem almost random. She no longer grasps the most basic notions: She has lost her sense of direction, so that the differences between east and west, and north and south, are meaningless to her; time is not continuous for her but seems to move slowly, quickly, or not at all; she cannot find the center of anything, including the “zone of stones” outside her cabin, “at the inexistent centre of a formless place”; and even sky and earth do not always seem distinct for her. These difficulties lead her to wonder what these notions meant for her when she was healthy. She questions the reality of many of the “opposites” humans posit to orient themselves within their world: good and bad, right and wrong, love and hate, reality and illusion, subject and object, self and other, center and periphery, black and white, and pleasure and pain. She suspects that no one has ever understood precisely the meaning of these words, that they may have no meaning at all, and that they have always been “ill said.” Because she cannot see properly or think properly, however, she has no way of resolving her suspicions. The suspicions themselves are thus misleading; they are simply a waste of time, whatever time might be. She is isolated and without hope. She can only await death.