EXISTENTIAL ABSURDITY: PREDICAMENTS ANCIENT AND MODERN

The eponymous protagonist of Samuel Beckett's early novel Murphy spends most of his time in search of an escape from the burden of mundane consciousness, or from what the novel calls his ‘unredeemed split self’. Murphy survives by cultivating a sort of impassivity: in Beckett's words, a ‘self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world which he had chosen for himself as the only felicity’. Such impassivity is a version of Greek ataraxia, and the novel itself invites us to think of Murphy's mental life as a whole in the terms of Greek philosophy. We learn, for one thing, how Murphy had studied with the eccentrically Pythagorean Neary, whose attempt to inculcate an ‘attunement’ and blending of ‘the opposites in Murphy's heart’ had proved fruitless. An entire chapter, moreover, is devoted to the depiction of Murphy's mind as both markedly tripartite and as a kind of private Platonic Cave, divided into zones of light, half light and darkness.