Word: mahood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...hapless, hopeless thing, he goes right on repeating his message. His latest novel to be published in the U.S. (it was written in 1953) does not back off an inch from the chasm. Watt is a worthy literary companion to such other Beckett anti-heroes as Murphy, Malone and Mahood. Like them, he does not have a chance, and does not really want...
...UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: "complete disintegration." Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner's wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds...
Author Beckett (Waiting For Godot) himself never answers these questions about his central character. His identity and his past remain obscure-beyond the fact that Mahood's entire family was killed off by sausage poisoning. But it does not take much imagination to see in Mahood (Manhood?) Author Beckett's savage symbol for mankind. Beckett's great strength is to make his readers uneasy. Like all Beckettmen, Mahood echoes the old existentialist plaint that he did not ask to be born and that life's mess is not of his making. Despairingly he sums...
...door to an escape from blobdom is left slightly ajar. For while oblivion is the goal, simple consciousness, and life itself, is against it. Mahood's last cry from his jar of sawdust is: "You must...