Conrad and Beckett: Jim: Marlow : : Molloy : Moran

Samuel Beckett wrote of a rupture in communication between subject and object, as a result of which what are called inside and outside are one and the same. Emile Benveniste's analysis of shifter pronouns shows how in writing "I" the subject is first constituted and then fades into its own irrecoverable object. Thus, the subject is separated from itself. According to Giorgio Agamben, such subjective disjunction is often a trauma. This essay will consider Lord Jim with Beckett's Molloy and The Unnamable, showing why, like Beckett's protagonists, neither Jim nor Marlow can ever recuperate the subject to itself.