Searching for Stories: Samuel Beckett's "Not I"

Human beings are obsessive storytellers. Reading fiction remains popular in literate societies primarily because novels allow us to dip into the minds of others. Otherwise in non-literate societies, cultural anthropologists have observed the preserve of storytelling rituals within local communities worldwide. In both Botswana and Namibia, for instance, hunter-gatherers still devote around eighty per cent of night-time conversation to storytelling; during the day, conversation restricts itself to practical matters [1]. Sharing stories is important, a vital passtime common among our species.

 

In addition, we are always telling ourselves stories – private ones, in a way necessary to our self understanding. Narrative transforms experience, and allows us to frame our lives in an comprehensible manner. Our own self-made stories permit us to contemplate our behaviour, our thoughts – our past actions.

 

Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” has its main character attempt to tell a story, only to fail in the process. The play explores the link between storytelling and selfhood, a unique work, wherein nothing much happens. Only a voice – a spot-lit mouth, centred on a pitch-black stage – drives the play’s narrative. With the sense of a fully fleshed story buried underneath the voice’s ramblings, a closer listen reveals cohesion, as the narrator attempts to relay their experience in plain detail.

 

Mouth, the storyteller, relishes in talking endlessly. Recounting a complex history of a woman’s life, Mouth’s narrative is third person, often proceeding then acceding, taking one step forward, then one step back. But the story’s details are secondary in importance; rather it is the act of speaking which – literally – takes centre stage. ‘[W]ords are coming,’ spurts Mouth – ‘a voice [the woman] did not recognize’, one that ‘could be none other . . . than her own’. The woman needs to talk: it is a ‘sudden urge’, which comes ‘once or twice a year’. These ‘certain vowel sounds’, the ‘odd word’, come as a means to ‘make some sense of it’ – to make sense of their life. Beckett’s narrator talks on and on, trying to get closer to this ideal.

 

“Not I” expresses our hunger for coherence. Among Mouth’s endless drawling, the listener is constantly digging for details, scavenging for cohesion, searching for the play's story. Yet this forgets the main point. We are not witnessing a fully formed story; we are watching Mouth twist and move, attempting to construct the story in itself. This is a constant in Beckett’s later works, as readers and audiences drift along with narrators on pathless paths – what the critic David Lodge has dubbed fictional ‘aporia’, a Greek term meaning ‘being at a loss’ [2].

 

Mouth’s steady stream of words is an attempt to rise above this state of being – to desperately create a narrative from nothing. The method consists of endless babble. Mouth hopes something meaningful (a story of some sort) will eventually arise in the end. Their urge to tell is indomitable. Even as the curtain comes down, and the stage’s setting disappears, the voice continues, ‘unintelligible’ before finally falling silent.

 

Source:

“Not I” in The Complete Dramatic Works, pp 373-85. By Samuel Beckett. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. 0-571-22915-8.

 

Notes:

[1] Barbara J. King, ‘A Primate’s Progress’ in TLS, 30 October 2020, no. 6135, p. 19.

[2] David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (London, 1992), p. 219.

"Stage in darkness but for MOUTH."
Swans, Filth © 1983