Novel: Murphy

Overview

Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy follows an Irish drifter in London who longs to withdraw from the demands of the world into a private, immobilized calm. Comic on the surface and metaphysical underneath, the book turns a love story, a farce of pursuit, and a workplace satire into an inquiry about the mind’s desire to be sealed off from time, desire, and other people. Its tone swings between slapstick and scholastic, staging arguments about consciousness in pubs, boardinghouses, and a mental hospital while needling the conventions of the realist novel.

Plot

When the book opens, Murphy has bound himself naked to a rocking chair, rocking toward a blank inward state that he takes as his true happiness. His lover, Celia Kelly, a London prostitute sustained by the hope that he will find work and marry her, demands a more ordinary arrangement. Driven by her ultimatum and by poverty, Murphy drifts through a series of failed attempts at employment before becoming an attendant at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, an asylum whose name hints at both charity and punishment. There he discovers a world that mirrors his psychology: patients who live sealed within private systems, unassailable by common sense or social obligation.

Among the inmates he fixates on Mr. Endon, a patient whose serenely closed mind seems the ideal Murphy has been chasing. Their celebrated chess game is played in an abstract, symmetrical sequence that Endon completes without regard for Murphy’s moves, a placid demonstration of perfect self-containment. Murphy, trying to enter that order, finds his own mind collapsing toward incoherence rather than release.

The chase from Dublin

Interlaced with Murphy’s London life is a comic pursuit narrative. Back in Dublin, the beautiful Miss Counihan, who once admired Murphy, and the grandiloquent Neary, who can arrest his own heartbeat and is obsessed with Miss Counihan, enlist the dismal private detective Cooper. Wylie, Murphy’s slippery acquaintance, drifts among them with divided loyalties. Their cross-channel search is fuelled less by clear motive than by jealousy, spite, and wounded vanity, and it repeatedly stalls in drink, misdirection, and Beckett’s puncturing asides. When they finally converge on Murphy’s London haunts, their confrontation yields little clarity. Murphy is no villain to unmask, only a man bent on vanishing from the traffic of other people’s claims.

Celia and the cost of withdrawal

Celia’s devotion gives the book its emotional ballast. She wants the simplest things, work, shelter, a life not lived on the street, yet her pleas are measured against Murphy’s dream of inward quiet. Their scenes trace a loving frustration: she recognizes his tenderness and his intelligence, but every step he takes toward the asylum world feels to her like a step away from shared life. Beckett balances sympathy between them without softening the harm that Murphy’s metaphysical hunger does to those who must eat, pay rent, and hope.

Style and ideas

Murphy is a novel of ideas written against the grain of solemn philosophy. It satirizes institutions, therapies, and pieties while rendering the mind as a labyrinth that logic cannot map. Its language turns scholastic distinctions and comic pedantry into instruments of play, and it treats the asylum not as a freak show but as a negative image of the sane world’s compulsions. The chess match, the rocking chair, and the asylum’s routines provide figures for closed systems, each promising peace at the price of relation.

Ending

Murphy’s course ends abruptly. After losing his post and retreating again to his lodgings, he dies in an accidental gas explosion, a banal catastrophe that empties his grand design of transcendence into farce. His friends retrieve his ashes, which are soon spilled on a pub floor and swept away with sawdust and slops. Celia, left to make do, is last seen reentering the city’s ordinary flux. The novel leaves behind the bleak comedy of a man who wanted nothing and the human remains that the world, untroubled, absorbs without a ripple.