'The mirthless laugh': Feeling pain in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels

This project analyzes pain in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. The narrators in Beckett's trilogy suffer greatly, though their despair sounds a deeply ironic affirmation. Beckett's narrators are often indifferent to their misery. To parody mind and body dualism, the pained body is often felt impersonally by Beckett's narrators. As bodies in Beckett's fiction disintegrate, phenomenal experience vanishes from consciousness, yet the narrators feel a certain pain from losing their ability to feel. Beckettian pain takes root in the inability to feel and know one's self. Two dissociative pain pathologies, traumatic neurosis and pain asymbolia, correspond with the painful dissociation we identify in Beckett's narrators. These pain pathologies suggest a model for how the perception of each narrator is fragmented, and how their pain is expressed in language. Beckett approaches a literariness of pain: words on the page do not merely represent painful experiences, but they are themselves instances of painful experience. Beckett's fiction offers a model of how pain gives form to the self, and how pain expresses the decomposition of the self. Beckettian pain presents itself as an ironic vehicle to understand how suffering animates consciousness and how pain gives us our formative understandings of life and death. This project studies pain from the vantage point of the one who suffers, and it offers a model of pain as a meaning system. Pain comes to us as a series of paradoxes. We often think of pain as a reaction to bodily damage, yet it is a mental experience that does not necessarily relate to a physical condition or to neural activity. Pain is unmediated perception, yet it mediates the information that damage has been done to the self. The suffering of one person is essentially inexpressible to another person; nonetheless we identify with others whom we perceive to be suffering, and we are obliged to give expression to our own suffering. Pain isolates us as individuals, and it brings us into a realm shared by humanity. Pain tells us plainly that we live, and that we will die.