Molloy Summary

Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, published in 1951, is a work of fiction with two first-person narrators. The first half is narrated by Molloy, who frequently shifts between present and past tense while recounting his experiences. The second half is narrated by Moran, a more methodical character who describes his journey in the present tense but uses the past tense for earlier events. Although Moran is on a quest to find Molloy, the two characters never meet. The novel's title comes from Molloy, the central figure of the first half and the target of Moran’s pursuit in the second.

Summary

Molloy is living in his mother’s room, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. He thinks he arrived in a vehicle and was possibly helped by a man who now visits him once a week. This man brings him money in exchange for papers. Molloy wants to focus on what little remains of his life and finish dying, but the man keeps bringing back his papers with corrections, expecting him to revise them. Molloy doesn’t do it, and the man scolds him.

Molloy feels weak and uncertain about many things. He doesn’t even know when his mother died. He assumes she must have, since he is now in her place. He wonders if he had a son, which would make him more like his mother. Thinking about this, he recalls women from his past—a chambermaid and a woman he once loved—who might have given him a son. But he quickly dismisses the idea.

The man who visits him said he started his writing the wrong way and should have begun differently. But Molloy insists he "began at the beginning," even though it was difficult. "Here's my beginning," he says. "It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it."

Molloy starts a new section, continuing until the end of his part of the story. He complains about how hard it is to write and how his mind and senses seem to be fading. He feels like he is reaching the end—of his life and his story—saying, "this time, then once more ... then perhaps a last time." He knows he must say goodbye. As people pass by, he struggles to tell them apart from himself.

He then describes watching two men, A and C, walking toward each other on an empty road in the hills, surrounded by fields with cows. One man was short, the other tall. Both had walked from a nearby town, but the first one turned back, so they ended up facing each other. They spoke briefly, then parted ways—A returning to town, and C walking away unsteadily. C, who carried a walking stick and wore a hat, looked old and afraid, though there was no reason for fear. Molloy watched as he disappeared into the distance, with night falling.

Molloy then observes A, who is bareheaded, wearing sandals, smoking a cigar, and followed by a small dog. He seems like a gentleman. But Molloy questions his own memory—maybe A was wearing boots, and maybe the dog was a stray. He even considers running after him despite his crutches, wanting to ask him about himself. "What I need now is stories," Molloy says. "It took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it." But he doesn’t call out to the man.

His thoughts return to C, walking away in his hat. Molloy takes off his own hat, looks at it, and waves it around, but decides he isn’t ready to talk about it yet. He sleeps for a while. In the end, Molloy makes up his mind to go see his mother. He stands, adjusts his crutches, and sets off down the road. To his surprise, he finds a bicycle—one he didn’t know he had—right where he left it.

Molloy describes attaching his crutches to his bicycle and pedaling, even though his legs are stiff. He refuses to call it a "bike." He finds joy in riding and in describing it. He especially loved the little red horn on the handlebars, which he kept and still enjoys writing about.

But he is supposed to be writing about his mother. He remembers being with her. She called him Dan—maybe because it was his father’s name. He called her Mag, explaining that adding the letter "g" removed the "Ma" from her name. She was deaf, incontinent, and spoke nonsense. He communicated with her by knocking on her head in a kind of code, but she often misunderstood.

Molloy says he knows his mother tried not to have him, but he still gives her credit for trying. She was not a great mother. If he ever searches for the meaning of his life, he will start with "that old mess." He insists he didn’t visit her for money, though he did take money from her.

Thinking about her room, he asks himself, "Shall I describe the room?" Then he answers, "No. I shall have occasion to do so later perhaps."

The day after watching A and C, Molloy rides his bicycle to town. When he stops to rest, a policeman disapproves of his posture and asks for his papers. Molloy has none. He is arrested and taken to the police station, where a sergeant questions him. Molloy struggles to answer and can't even remember his own name.

Suddenly, he remembers and shouts it aloud. When asked if that’s his mother’s name too, he thinks maybe it is. He is moved to another room, where a woman—possibly a social worker—offers him tea and bread. Not wanting to accept it gratefully, he flings it away. By late afternoon, he is released but warned to behave better. He doesn’t understand why they let him go and thinks that strictly applying the law to someone like him must be difficult.

He decides never to rest with his head down on his bicycle in public again, since that’s what got him into trouble. He realizes people prefer to see "manifestations of strength." If someone tells him what good behavior is, he believes he can follow it. But no one ever taught him the "essence of the system"—only small, scattered rules.

He sucks on some stones from his pocket and rides away. He forgets where he was going and ends up outside town near a canal. Lying on the grass, he suddenly remembers he was going to see his mother, though he can’t recall why. He sleeps and wakes the next day to see a shepherd and his dog watching him. He asks the shepherd where he is going, but the man says nothing and moves on. Molloy then calculates how often he farts in an hour before continuing his journey to find his mother.

As Molloy continues his journey, he reaches a town that looks familiar, but he can’t remember its name or whether it’s the right place. While lost in thought, waiting to ask someone for the name of the town, he accidentally runs over and kills a dog. A crowd gathers and chases him as he tries to escape. But the dog's owner, a woman Molloy calls Mrs. Loy or Mrs. Lousse, intervenes. She tells the crowd that the situation isn’t so bad—she was taking the dog to the vet to be put down anyway.

Lousse asks Molloy to help her bury the dog. Since he can’t carry it himself, they place it on his bicycle. At her home, she digs a hole near a tree and buries it. Molloy, unable to help because of his bad leg, says, "I contributed my presence. As if it had been my own burial."

Afterward, Lousse invites him inside and gives him food and drink. She takes his hat and hangs it up. Her caged parrot repeatedly swears in both English and French. Molloy falls asleep and wakes up in a bed, now bathed and wearing a nightdress. Finding the door locked, he looks at the full moon through the window before sleeping again. He remembers that just two nights ago, when he saw A and C, the moon was new. This makes him wonder if more time has passed than he thought—perhaps 14 days instead of two.

The next day, a valet brings him fresh clothes and tidies the room. Molloy realizes that his sucking stone has been taken from his pocket. When he goes to find his bicycle, he discovers it stuck in a bush and cannot pull it free. Lousse invites him to stay in her large home, where he will be taken care of for the rest of his life. He rarely sees her and spends most of his time in the garden. He stays for "a good while"—maybe a few months, maybe a year—claiming she drugged his food and drink to keep him there.

He recalls an older woman from his past, named something like Ruth or Edith, who first taught him about sex. They met in a garbage dump, and she would bring him to her apartment, where they would sleep together. She gave him money afterward. One day, he found her dead in the bathtub, having bathed in anticipation of his arrival. He’s unsure if what they had was love, but he never sought another lover. Sometimes, he confuses Ruth with Lousse, and sometimes both women blend together with his mother in his memory.

After about a year, on a warm night, Molloy leaves Lousse’s house without saying goodbye—and without his bicycle.

Molloy wanders through the town, looking for a place to rest and find relief. At one point, he tries to cut his wrists, but the pain stops him. He sleeps a little, then continues his journey the next day. It is raining, so he takes shelter in a doorway for a while.

He mentions stealing a small object, along with some silver spoons, from Lousse’s house. He doesn’t know what the object is, but he keeps carrying it even as he writes his story. Still determined to find his mother, he says he needs to settle things between them—something he has been trying to do his whole life. He wonders if this is the town where she is, but he is never quite sure. The place feels both familiar and unfamiliar.

At the seashore, he gathers pebbles—more "sucking stones." He collects 16 of them and distributes them evenly among his four pockets. Wanting to suck all of them equally, one by one, he creates a system for rotating them between pockets. But he finds this method unsatisfactory. After much effort, he devises a better, though complicated, system for ensuring each stone is sucked fairly. He is pleased with his solution. Then he realizes that keeping just one stone would achieve the same result. If he loses that one, it won’t make much difference.

He stays by the shore for some time, perhaps many days. Eventually, he feels the urge to find his mother again and heads inland.

As Molloy continues his journey, he describes how his better leg gradually worsens until both legs are stiff and in pain. The first leg that went bad is also shortening, making walking and standing even harder. Most of his travel is along rough forest paths, which only make things worse. But it’s not just his legs—his whole body is growing weaker since leaving the seaside. He loses control of the toes on one foot and moves painfully slow, sometimes managing only 30 or 40 steps a day.

He feels that death, or some final reckoning, is near. Soon, he will have to account for "what is left of all I had." His pain makes him think again about ending his life. He sees life as an endless forward motion, where stopping—even for a moment—is impossible. Yet, despite his personal struggle, he acknowledges that his suffering is nothing compared to the vast, relentless movement of everything else in existence.

Deep in the dark forest, he meets a charcoal-burner, a man who makes charcoal. Molloy says he might have loved him—he recalls that, as a child, he loved old men. The charcoal-burner wants him to stay. Molloy, however, is only interested in finding a way out of the forest, but he cannot understand the man's speech. When Molloy begins to leave, the man pulls on his sleeve as if asking him to stay. In response, Molloy strikes him with a crutch, knocking him out, and then kicks him twice—once on each side, to make it symmetrical.

Molloy keeps wandering through the forest. He’s heard that people who think they’re walking in a straight line in the woods are actually moving in circles. To counter this, he deliberately tries to walk in a circle, hoping it will result in a straight path—or at least something different from a circle. Day and night, he follows this plan, convinced he will eventually find a way out.

Despite this, he doesn’t really want to leave. The forest isn’t such a bad place to live. But he feels compelled to go to his mother. He reflects that, throughout his life, he has always been trying to reach her, hoping to establish a more stable relationship. Even when he seemed to give up or focus on other things, he was still thinking about how to return to her.

As he continues moving, walking becomes too difficult. He starts pulling himself forward on his stomach or back, which has the advantage of allowing him to rest whenever he needs to. Sometimes he simply says, "Mother."

One day, still trying to move in circles, he reaches the forest’s edge and falls into a ditch. When he opens his eyes, he sees sunlight and a vast plain stretching before him, with a faint outline of a town in the distance. But he can’t be sure if it’s his town—he’s never certain what his town really is. Then he hears a voice telling him not to worry, that help is coming. As he lies there, he begins to remember scenes from his life.

Moran, an agent, narrates the second half of the novel. It begins at midnight, with Moran unable to sleep. He gets up and sits at his desk to work on a report, noting that his teenage son, also named Jacques, is still asleep.

Moran expresses a sense of being finished—physically or mentally—and worries about his son's future. Then he recounts how he was assigned to track down Molloy. The order came on a Sunday morning while Moran was relaxing in his garden, listening to birds before church. A man named Gaber arrived with instructions. Though Moran found the assignment dull, he was flattered when Gaber said their superior, Youdi, specifically requested him. That convinced him to take the job.

Gaber told Moran he had to leave that very day and take his son with him. By the time their conversation ended, Moran had missed morning Mass—something highly unusual for him. He resolved to attend the afternoon service to receive Communion.

Moran remains seated at his desk, reflecting on how he initially did not take the Molloy case seriously, though he senses that the “poison” of the assignment is already working on him. When his son, Jacques, returns from church, Moran goes upstairs to his bedroom, where he begins considering the Molloy affair and making plans. However, he avoids thinking about the “kernel” of the matter.

He later goes to church to receive Communion from Father Ambrose, but afterward, he is troubled by the thought that drinking beer with Gaber may have made his Communion ineffective. This leaves him in a bad mood. Returning home, he becomes irritated when his housekeeper, Martha, serves him stew without onions. His frustration grows, though he doesn’t fully understand why he is losing control of his emotions, which frustrates him even more.

Moran instructs Jacques to pack for their journey, allowing him to bring only one album from his stamp collection. Later, he catches Jacques sneaking extra stamps into the album and, angered by this deception, forbids him from bringing any stamps at all. Jacques is hurt and resentful.

Lying in bed, Moran contemplates the state of humankind before turning his thoughts back to the Molloy affair. He senses an odd connection between himself and Molloy—whom he also refers to as "Mollose"—though he cannot fully grasp its nature. He wonders if Molloy was “one destined to occupy us, sooner or later” and even entertains the possibility that he had imagined Molloy before ever hearing of him from Gaber.

Moran fixates on Molloy’s name, considering various possible endings like “oy,” “ose,” “one,” and “oc,” though he is certain the first syllable is “Mol.” He knows little about the man beyond the fact that he is constrained by space and time but is still rushing toward his objectives in despair. In his mind, he forms a picture of Molloy.

Shifting into the present tense, Moran comments on the nature of his narrative. He acknowledges that the Molloy he has imagined and the "true Molloy" must be very different. He also recognizes that the Molloy described by Gaber, as well as the one Youdi wants him to find, are yet other versions of Molloy, each distinct from the others.

Moran’s journey with his son, Jacques, begins under tense circumstances. That night, Jacques refuses his dinner, complaining of feeling unwell. Moran, determined to maintain control, forces an enema on the boy and makes him eat. During this process, he experiences a sharp pain in his knee, which he treats with medicine. Later, once Jacques is asleep, Moran steps into the garden and gazes up at the windows of his house, contemplating his departure. Back inside, he checks on his sleeping son and then begins packing. Although he does not want to bring Jacques along, he resigns himself to the necessity of doing so.

Shortly before midnight, Moran wakes Jacques from a deep sleep. The boy, still unwell, protests, but Moran forces him to leave. Their departure is chaotic, filled with anger and resentment—Jacques is furious at being dragged along, and Moran is frustrated by his son’s resistance. They set out on foot, bound for "the Molloy country," which Moran identifies as a northern town called Bally and its surrounding countryside, Ballyba.

They walk for several days, camping at night. Moran mentions "various adventures" along the way but deliberately omits the details. As their journey continues, Moran realizes he cannot remember exactly what Gaber instructed him to do once he finds Molloy. Rather than dwell on this gap in knowledge, he decides to figure it out later.

Meanwhile, Moran’s knee pain worsens, and soon he struggles to bend it. This new physical affliction slows him down, adding to the frustrations of their already difficult journey.

Moran wrote in his journal using the past tense. His leg became so stiff that he struggled to stand up. He sent his son, Jacques, to town to buy a bicycle with a working bell. Jacques did not want to go but went anyway. While his son was away, Moran tried to move his leg a little. He walked to a stream to wash his face and hands. He saw his reflection in the water, but when he disturbed the surface, his image disappeared. He waited for it to return, and slowly, the reflection came back, becoming clearer.

Later that day, a man with a stick came near. After a while, he asked Moran for bread. The man spoke with a strange accent, as if he was not used to speaking. Instead of giving him bread, Moran offered a tin of sardines. When the man did not take the sardines, Moran finally gave him the bread he had asked for. Moran asked to see the man's stick, and the man let him. Then the man took back his stick and left.

Moran used his umbrella like a cane to practice walking around his small shelter. He kept wondering what he was supposed to do with Molloy. He knew he had instructions but could not remember them. When he started to recall them, his mind avoided thinking about them. He ate most of his food but did not make any plan to get more. On the second night after his son left, another man came to him. The man asked questions like, "What are you doing?" and "Do you hear me?" Moran thought the man looked like him and guessed he was looking for the man with the stick. Moran said he had not seen anyone, but the man did not believe him. The man reached his hand toward Moran, and suddenly, Moran beat him to death. Afterward, the man no longer looked like him. Moran hid the body.

Moran realized he had lost his keys. He lay on the ground and rolled around, trying to find them because his leg was too stiff to move properly. He made his way to a nearby hill and lay there, asking himself questions. Some questions had no answers, while others he answered in a mixed-up way. He worried about killing the man but reassured himself that Youdi would protect him.

On the evening of the third day, Jacques returned with the bicycle. Moran got angry at him for paying too much money for it. Then he sat on the bicycle and made Jacques pedal him around. This way, they got close to Bally. Outside the town, they met a shepherd with sheep and a dog. Moran could not speak at first, but finally, he asked if they were in Ballyba. The shepherd nodded and pointed in the direction of Bally before walking away.

That night, Moran and his son argued. In the morning, Moran woke up to find that Jacques, most of his money, and the bicycle were gone.

Moran wrote that he was now alone with only his umbrella, his bag, and 15 shillings. He stayed in the same place for several days, eating the last of his food and waiting. He wished Jacques would return or that Molloy would appear and become his friend or even a father figure. He wanted to do his duty so that Youdi would not punish him. As time passed, he grew weaker and could no longer lean on his umbrella. Despite this, he felt happy and often laughed.

One day, Gaber arrived and told Moran to go home. Gaber looked at him, said his name, and opened his notebook but made no comment about Moran’s poor condition. Moran asked about Youdi but got unclear answers. When Gaber started to leave, Moran tried to follow, but Gaber pushed him away, making him fall. Gaber then said, "Life is a thing of beauty ... and a joy for ever." Moran closed his eyes and asked if Youdi meant human life, but when he opened them, Gaber was gone. That night, Moran started his journey home, counting his steps and using his umbrella for support. After traveling all winter, he finally reached home in the spring.

Looking back on his journey, Moran wrote about the strange religious questions that had filled his mind. He also wondered, "What happened to Molloy?" and "What will happen to me?" He thought a lot about the bees in his garden, which brought him comfort. As he traveled, he enjoyed thinking about how the bees moved and danced, knowing it was something he could study forever but never fully understand. He saw them as a "joy" and a noble thing, too pure to be ruined by human thoughts. He said he did not want to destroy his love for the bees as he had done with God, to whom he had been taught to attribute his emotions and even his body. He also noticed that the journey had made him look shabby and worn down.

Near the end of his journey, he met a large farmer who accused him of trespassing. The farmer let him go after Moran said he needed to pray at a Madonna statue in town. When Moran finally got home, he found that his bees and hens were dead and his house was empty. There was a letter from Jacques and another from Youdi, asking for a report. Gaber and Father Ambrose visited him, and Moran began using crutches.

Moran ended his writing by saying he was starting to understand the voice that had been guiding him. He had learned its language and followed its instructions to write his report. He then reread the first words of his report: "It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows." But he ended by correcting himself: "It was not midnight. It was not raining."