The Devil’s in the Details: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Religion in Beckett’s ‘Malone Dies’ Charles Graff 12th Grade

‘Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details for once - you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth), and said in a comfortable tone – ’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

Typically one expects of an item of fiction a certain degree of world-building, a certain vividness and depth within the fictional world that eases the suspension of disbelief and allows the reader to access the story. To build a vivid world necessitates the inclusion of detail and to include detail is to run the risk, as Eliot’s narrator suggests, of overburdening the reader with detail that is unnecessary to conveying the point of the story. Beckett’s ‘Malone Dies’, however, serves as a counterpoint to the notion that a fictional world should be breathed into existence as if it were a real one through its philosophical references and literary technique. The novel presents a myriad of views on what it means to...