Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable经典读后感有感
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》是一本由Samuel Beckett著作，Everyman's Library出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 24.00，页数：520，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》读后感(一)：Beckett - First Read
I'm at a lose for words, (well, proper words) to describe just how bizarre I feel upon the first read of Beckett. It's like being molested at parts which I didn't know could be sexual before, shamed by the insolence and mortified by the audacity, but secretly liking it.
quot;What I'd like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying."
quot;Or did she only die after？ I mean enough to bury."
quot;They look alike, but no more than others do."
quot;Yeah, night was gathering, but the man was innocent."
quot;A pomeranian I think, but I don't think so."
quot;My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me."
quot;I thought of the food I had refused. I took a pebble from my pocket and sucked it."
quot;Precautions are like resolutions, to be taken with precaution."
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》读后感(二)：On Beckett - (4)
Lately, I feel increasingly lonely in my reading experience. I'm using the word "lonely" in a neutral tone, without the negative connotation usually associated with it. It's as if I'm walking deeper and deeper into a no-man’s-land, all the while fully aware of a total disconnection with the real world. I used to think reading makes me a better person, or makes my life more self-sustainable, and to a certain extent, and for a while, it's true. As I gradually broadened my horizon in the literature world, my self-assurance unconsciously grew with it. But that comes with a price, I become ensnared in this massive web I waved for myself. The first symptom is the increasing random quotes popping up in writing and conversation, most of which deliberate and unnecessary. It's the first symptom of a dangerous tendency, of referencing real life to a personal literary universe. As the symptom worsens, the quotes become more tangental and obscure, the worst of them being quotes from myself. Although I can safely say this is not done out of vanity or desire to show off, it does make communication increasingly difficult and eventually self-selective: I increasingly only talk to those who can understand, and eventually, as the web becomes wider-spread and more-exclusive, only to myself. I keep looking inward for validation for every real world experience, labeling it as true or false depending on if a reference is found. When I write about a book, or a movie, it's not really about the book or the movie itself, it's about its location on this value system, or the lack of it.
I think to a very large extent that's the real problem when I was waylaid by the Trilogy. It forces itself into this elaborately waved system, his mastery of words not only commands a force to be reckon with, but also a messages not to be denied. It completely breaks down the system and reduces it to total chaos. It's as if a life-time Catholic finally get a chance to meet to Pope, only to be told it's all really just a hoax. Isn't that to an extent what Salieri thought Mozart did to him？ Salieri finally met this person who's blessed with the highest form of talent, but what he does with it, he only uses it to mock the less fortunate ones and music itself.
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》读后感(三)：On Beckett - (2)
The immediate impact was somewhat a surprise to me, and I had this feeling of being waylaid from the very beginning. I was no doubt fascinated by the unique approach of narration as well as his mastery (or there are times where maybe the more proper word is "trickery", with the cunning but not the negative connotation) on the tempo of words. It's surprising how he can paint the full spectra of total detachment and deliver the utter hopelessness inevitably associated with it, in just a matter of 3 pages. It took Kafka and Camus a whole book to do it. I naturally wondered, and anticipated with excitement, where this high intensity and efficiency lead to. And maybe that was where disaster stroke. Excitement is not me, I don't get excited, ever. Maybe there is a reason for it. Anyway I digress. Yes, where will it lead to. I turned each page with the excitement of a kid unwrapping his X'mas gift. I found out the answer pretty quick to, and it's devastating just like how a kid looking forward to a PS3 ended up getting a sweater – it leads to NOWHERE. It's a reign of Chaos, Chaos in its most profound, frightening and destructive sense. And that’s exact what Beckett intended to convey, and as soon as I realized that, the fear was instilled in me.
In Paradise Lost there is Heaven, which in my mind is always like somewhat a field of blinding light (in a rather unpleasant sense) and floating cotton candies everywhere; there is Paradise, again to me nothing more than an overgrown tropic jungle; there is Hell, which strangely evokes a sense of grandiose and purpose in me, a cradle for the ultimate anti-hero (Blake did comment that Milton is more at easy writing about Hell that Heaven, being a fellow devil of his). And then there is the place that stands between Heaven and Hell, which does not even have a name, where Chaos rules:
efore their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And CHAOS, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal ANARCHIE, amidst the noise
Of endless wars and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
trive here for Mastery, and to Battle bring
Their embryon Atoms;
…
Into this wild Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
ut all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds…
THAT's the place Beckett has conjured up. The place with no name, the place that nearly swallow up Satan like the raging sea would swallow up a boat:
Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets
A vast vacuity: all unawares
Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not by ill chance
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud
Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him
ow, this is the place initially everything was created from, by the divine intervention that pulled the world out from this ungodly orderlessness. Who, (apparently not even Satan itself), would be audacious enough to send this world as we know it spinning back to that state, by sheer power of his words？
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》读后感(四)：On Beckett - (3)
The fact that he wreaks havoc between the two ends of a book in itself should not be so threatening. After all one of the great past-times of human being is to conjure up all sorts of fucked-up situations and write a book about it. Double-crossing, backstabbing, murder, suicide, adultery, incest, you name it. If there is a sin, there is a book about it. And that's just Shakespears. But of course it's a cliche to say tragedies exist because of their therapeutic values. The indescribable joy of seeing the neigbour's house on fire, is the reason God has forsaken us in the first place. I admit I did derive some sort of odd joy when I fist started to read it: "It's like being molested at parts which I didn't know could be sexual before, shamed by the insolence and mortified by the audacity, but secretly liking it." Cocky. And I paid for it. So what is it in his book that spilled over into reality and hung over my already meager existence like a constant menace？ He denied the basic assumptions we, I, built my existence on. The most apparent one is what we know as time.
There is not a single word about religion (if my memory serves me right), but the trilogy in its essense is deeply Antichrist, at least as I read it. It is Antichrist in the sense that it completely denies the continuity of time as we know it, and religion is rooted in the divine continuity. Time started at creation, drags us through an endless variety of living hell which are all our own fault and eventually leads up to Judgment Day. I might very well be a part of this grandiose divine plan, but what it is to me if I don't live to witness the Grand Finale？ I met with a financial advisor a couple of weeks ago and he showed me a chart of my life insurance payout scheme. It goes up to 50 years and stops. At my age, when mortality starts to enter into the equation as a real parameter, concepts like "forever" or "end of the world" means very little to me. "Till Death do us apart"？ Ok, fine. Maybe. "Love you foever"？ Don't think so. But Beckett won't even give me that. Put it this way, his "world" is Already the end of the world. Time comes here to die. No more time, none, no such concept anymore in this "world". There is no memories or hope, no looking back or forward, everything is present, now, happening at the same instant, all jumbled together, in an in-your-face kind of way. This "world" is poetentially more devastating than the Judgment Day, when the earth will be burning and the sky will rain meteoroid (personally I never understand the point of this Holy firework show but like they'd teach you the first day of law school, don't fight the hypo). After this terrible fanfare at least part of the population, presumably, get to go to Heaven and live happily ever after. Again, the concept of time sits awkwardly here. Augstine, in answering the smartass question, "What is God doing before he created the world？", commented "Maybe preparing the Hell for those who dare to ask this kind of questions". Fair enough, but what about After？ If the world as we know it finally comes to an end, what’s the point of time continuing to exist？ If there is no time then there is no "ever after", the chosen ones will be just living in a similar chaos Beckett has depicted. And even with the added blinding lights and endless cotton candies, that would not be a world I'd want to live in.
《Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable》读后感(五)：On Beckett - (1)
I was at a loss for words, when a particularly cynical friend of mine, in the context of after-lunch speculations on social economics, asked, "how much is a reasonable salary for an English literature professor in a random liberal art college？" I don't have a legitimate counter argument to the underlying accusation that in an ideal society of ruthless economic efficiency, we shouldn’t be dragging the dead weight of redundant words. Nor can I come up with a number for the fair market value of what was perceived here as a mere necessary pretense of an "evolved" society. we don't need literature. I don't need literature. Evidenced by the 4-month dry spell. In fact, the 100 or so words I just typed, at 1:10am in the middle of a week, is itself nothing but yet another restatement of maybe the most meaningless cliche. Presumptuously summoning up what's already been beat to death a thousand times, only to commit my personal offense over its corpse.
Just like summer 2003 is a 3 months of uncanny productivity which now only serves as a constant reminder that my best days are already behind me, March 2008 to March 2009 is a year that has left an unmistakable mark on my literature experience and changed it in a way I likely will not experience again. Almost everything I've read in the span of this 12 months had an immediately impact on me in its own profound way, and the resonances of them all eventually proved to be too much to bear. It started with a brief, and I'd say relatively harmless prelude with the Trial, then the first wave of shock came in the form of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Followed by Crime and Punishment, a heavy dose of what turned out to be more or less nothing. But that two months of half-sleepiness was succeeded by Paradise Lost, which marked the onset of a wallow in Biblical images and metaphors that to this day has not shown any sign of relenting its grip on me. I was enchanted by the metaphysical image of flight like the particular paragraphs had been tattooed in my brain. It also directly caused the ensuing nosedive into Blake (mixed with a brief revisit to Chinese classical writings, for no apparent reason). Upon arriving in Manhattan I took a detour to Anna Karenina. It solidified my genral aversion to the love of an unattainable woman but very little beyond that. Around deep September Borges made his entrance, sprawled a world of imagination and creativity that is almost divine and fascinated me to no end. Although not without its own fair share of Biblical references and speculations, Borges to me read like a boundless green pasture floating on a boundless sea of darkness and chaos, the sea of the Word and everything else engendered from it. "Beast in the Jungle" and "The Turn of the Screw" I mainly read on sunless Sunday afternoons, October, November, in the crispy air by the river side, on the bench facing Queens and over Turkish Gold and a lukewarm cup of Latte. "Beast" is dear and near to me only on a personal level. Then after rain on 1st Ave, snow over East River and wind that dutifully blew in everywhich direction (not necessarily in that order), came January and on the airplane back to China I opened Beckett's Trilogy. A fateful moment, to say the least. In the following two months I've experienced every awe, ecstasy, resignation, jealousy and hatred that must have burnt through Salieri's soul and eventually turned him into the demon, not to suggest I even have the caliber anywhere near his. At a moment of unguarded cockiness I commented, "I worship Borges as a pagan god at his best moments, but I fear Beckett like a Biblical (or should I say more precisely, Blakesque) Devil through and through".
It Shut me Down. I watched my literary vanity lit up as if on gasoline and burnt swiftly to ashes, leaden ashes without a hint of umber. For the 4 months after, I can’t so much as read a label on a bottle of shampoo without having a faint feeling of nausea in my stomach. Words disgusted me.