The Posthumous Worlds of Not I and Play

Most audience members at a performance of Samuel Beckett's Not I would likely be surprised to hear that the disjointed staccato monologue delivered by Mouth actually relates a coherent narrative. Even on the printed page, the text of the play initially seems an utterly confused stream of fragmented thoughts. Beckett himself expressed little interest in the play's plot, at least insofar as it would be communicated to an audience in performance. In a letter to Jessica Tandy, who first performed the role in the U.S., he wrote, "I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not on its intellect" (qtd. in Brater 190). He insisted that the actress should deliver the text at an almost breathless pace. In performance, this speed creates an hypnotic effect on the audience, as they focus their attention on the single bright spot on the stage, the disembodied mouth suspended eight feet in the air, and struggle to catch bits and pieces of an already disjointed stream of language. At points, the text itself seems to mock their attempts, as Mouth says, for instance, "it can't go on . . . all this . . . all that . . . steady stream . . . straining to hear . . . make something of it . . . " (220).¹

Even in performance, however, an astute listener can discern that Mouth is narrating someone's life story and that she seems particularly invested in maintaining the identity of that someone as another female. Five times she interrupts the flow of her narrative with "what? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she!" (217, 219, 221, 222). An even more astute listener (aided, of course, by the play's title) may infer from the similarities between Mouth's narrative and her current situation that it is in fact her own story she is narrating, even as she continues what Beckett, in his Note on the movements of the Auditor, calls her "vehement refusal to relinquish third person" (215). A close reading of the text reveals a number of details about her life, beginning with her conception, birth, and abandonment by her parents. She was raised in a waifs' home and eventually came to live at or near Croker's Acres. She lived alone for most of her life, bereft of love, and she was almost entirely mute, except for occasional, incomprehensible explosions of verbiage, always in winter and darkness. She went to the market and bought food without speaking, and once she was hauled into court and told to defend herself for some obscure offense. She may have had one or more sexual encounters, which she did not enjoy ("just as the odd time . . . in her life . . . when clearly intended to be having pleasure . . . she was in fact . . . having none" [217]). She once found a tear on the palm of her hand and assumed it to be hers, as there was no one else around. Then, at the age of nearly seventy, she was gathering cowslips in Croker's Acres on an April morning when, suddenly, or gradually, the light went out and she found herself in a state of confusion and darkness. So far, none of this is surprising to anyone who has read the play carefully. The uncertain part of the narrative is the nature of this state of confusion and darkness, and its temporal relationship to the other events. Most critics do not attempt to construct a strict order to the events Mouth describes, and they often conflate her wintertime "sudden urge[s] to . . . tell" (222) with her present condition. Critics such as Enoch Brater, Katherine Kelly, Kathleen O'Gorman, and Paul Lawley either focus on the other events she talks about merely as a set of related thematic motifs or else create speculative plotlines that Mouth's narrative tries to hide, such as one involving rape² or another in which she is dismembered and sent to the underworld as an Irish Orpheus.³

The vague catastrophe that takes place in Croker's Acres in April seems to me to be her death. She then moves on to a sort of purgatorial state, which is where she is now. She repeatedly describes this...