Molloy (1955): Molloy is in his mother’s room, not knowing how he got there, writing a statement in instalments which are collected each week; recalls watching two men from hill outside town, moving in opposite directions; he questions his memory and the number of occasions involved; recounts setting out to see mother on a bicycle; gives description of methods of propulsion; runs over small dog, gets arrested, and is rescued by Miss Lousse and coddled by her; escapes from her house on crutches; recalls a previous affair; finds himself beside the sea making a store of sucking stones; reflects on possible rotation of suckings stones from pocket(s) to mouth; is reduced to crawling; crawls on back [‘plunging my crutches wildly [...] I was on my way to my mother’]; crawls through forest, ends in ditch; seemingly kills a charcoal burner. Moran, a detective, instructed by Gaber who is subordinate in turn to Youdi; gives accounts of his house, his garden and a son, whom he bullies and mistreats in various ways; also Martha, maid and cook; mentions his church and priest; heading for Bally in townland of Ballyba with his sick son; sleeps out; suffers pain in knee; sends son to town for bicycle; a man with a ‘pale and noble face’ asks him for bread; suspects it could be Molloy; puts bread in different pockets; kills another man who turns up, without disclosing how; reaches Ballyba district; his son deserts him with the bicycle; Gaber turns up and orders him home; spends a whole winter on the journey; finds his bees and hens dead, and Martha gone; ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight, It was not raining’ [End].

Malone Dies (1956), An old man near death, in apartment block, is writing in an exercise book; he relates stories and makes an inventory of his possessions; expresses contempt for story-telling and its tedium; introduces Sapo, the son of the Sapsocats, whose impecunious father continually thinks of getting a job; quiet boy with streak of indiscipline; throws the master’s cane through window at school; mysteriously not expelled (suggesting that Malone is ‘inventing’ these details); contradictions mount; Sapo has no friends but also ‘on good terms with his little friends’; he loves nature; meets the Lamberts on walk, a squalid family; Big Lambert, a pig bleeder and disjointer; the pigs are blind and feeble; Lamberts bury a dead mule clumsily; Sapo becomes Macmann, and is ‘found’ again (according to Malone, who wonders how he could stick the name of Sapo for so long; Macmann becomes a vagrant; ends up in the House of St John of God, asylum for alcoholics, where he is looked after by Moll who sports with crucifixes for earrings and a carved crucifix on single tooth [cf. Golgotha]; towards the close of their idyll, Macmann writes poems about love as ‘lethal glue’; one Lemuel then tells Macmann that Moll is dead; Malone’s visitor gives him a blow on the head, whistling on the stairs after; Lemuel takes Macmann and others to see druid remains on an island; he kills and maims them there; the story ends with Malone’s implied death.

The Unnamable (1958): ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (opening sentence); the speaker cannot be silent; he speaks out of nothing, and speaks of Malone ‘his mortal likeness’; Malone has gone past, so he is at the centre, or may be in motion instead; hears sounds; remembers visitors, though how can be be visited, being nowhere himself?; a visitor called Basil has imposed on him; Murphy, Molloy, Malone are all tracings; nothing to be said of that; the narrator is like a talking ball; believes silence would be better; Basil returns as Mahood; Mahood invents stories stories of narrator’s childhood, falsifying details; the narrator is a trunk ot jar near shambles opposite a steak-house, which is emptied weekly by proprietoress, using his filth on lettuces; possible identity of Mahood and Unnamable discussed; emergence of Worm, possibly a stage of development towards Unnamable; threatens (hopes) to go silent; fears to be punished; fixates on a ‘small voice’; desires to be punished; imagines he will recover senses (sight, hearing, &c; reduce to pure narrative, variable and speculative fictions (I’m still in it, I left myself behind in it, I’m waiting for me there, [...] perhaps it’s a dream [...], a dream of silence, full of murmurs’); feels abandoned; feels himself carried to the ‘threshold of his story’ amid self and silence, distant cries and the threatening nameless other; can he go on?: ‘I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on ... you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ [End.].