The Photograph

Malone, the closest thing in Malone Dies to a narrator, writes about a photograph owned by the probable mental patient Macmann depicting Macmann's caretaker and lover Moll as a girl, who on the day of the picture-taking celebrated her fourteenth birthday outside with a Punch and Judy puppet show.

In old age, Moll has a "dreadful smile" and a penchant for vomiting (273). Her girlhood self was equally charming: posing for the camera near a rose-covered trellis and a chair, Moll "diligently presse[s] her lips together, in order to hide her great buck-teeth" (273).

It comes as no surprise, then, that "what [Macmann] like[s] best in this picture" is not his lover but "the chair, the seat of which seemed to be made of straw" (273).

Still, the photograph seems to resonate with Macmann, who (although this thought may belong to Malone (though it may not matter because Malone may be Macmann)) imagines that "the roses must have been pretty, they must have scented the air" (273). With such imagining, Macmann assimilates Moll's memories, experiencing aspects of a birthday he did not experience.

Or did he?

Traditionally, Punch and Judy shows were held in seaside towns. Macmann's own town is near the sea, and it's mentioned that Macmann eventually "[tears] up this photograph and [throws] the bits in the air, one windy day" (273). Windy day. Where better to find wind than the coast? Perhaps Macmann visited the seashore, saw a rose-covered trellis, and watched a puppet show, and the photograph represents the memory of these experiences. Or perhaps Malone had these experiences and gave them to his character Macmann.

In just one paragraph, a day is depicted in a photograph contemplated by a character devised by a writer named Malone.* A similar chain, or hierarchy, of existences appears in "Company," in which a "cantankerous other" is aware of a voice which is aware of man laying down. In Malone Dies, as in other Beckett works, consciousnesses merge and the fictionalized past becomes inseparable from present reality.

*And of course, there's a being even higher being on this chain: the writer himself, Samuel Beckett.