By George

Isolation and Alienation in Beckett’s ‘Murphy’ and Isherwood’s ‘A Single Man’

This was an extended essay I wrote for my A Level English coursework (or Pre-U “Personal Investigation”). It is dense (my seventeen-year-old self might’ve said sesquipedalian) but I’m still rather proud of it – it took me ages and was quite a personal project.

Beckett’s Murphy (Beckett, 1938) and Isherwood’s A Single Man (Isherwood, 1964) (ASM) share a distinctly human conflict, being the cultural and personal estrangement experienced as a result of a society that forcefully fragments one’s true being. This predicament permeates the novels’ underlying syntactical structures and deeply affects the protagonists’ relationship with their self and surroundings. In Beckett’s work, the central problem emerges from Murphy’s inability to operate within both ‘the big world and the little world’ (101), that is to say what exists outside of his mind and what lies within. Such an incongruence of character leads to deliberate isolation due to his favouring of the ‘little world’ (101), which ultimately proves unsustainable. In contrast, George (ASM’s protagonist) strives constantly for meaningful connection, but is ostracised by his nationality, sexuality and age, which define him as the unapproachable other; it is only in death that he finally belongs to a majority. In spite of this distinction, George is cognisant of the dualistic conundrum which also pervades Murphy’s consciousness, and the depersonalising diction suggests an analogous disharmony of identity at the heart of their alienation. Ambiguous narrative voices in Nabokov’s Pnin (Nabokov, 1957) and Eliot’s Collected Poems (Eliot, 1909–1962) exemplify such techniques, once again manifesting a disconnected and often disorientating mood despite uncomplicated storylines. It is these particularities of structure, narrative, and characterisation which form the principal methods used by both Beckett and Isherwood to explore isolation and alienation—here defined as a disconnection from the reader or within the story—and yet their overall impressions are glaringly disparate.

Given their centrality, it is surprising that these themes are obfuscated from one’s initial perception of the texts. Murphy, for example, has an expected nondescriptness when first encountered in the novel’s title (or would have been upon publication, when Beckett’s writing was neither acknowledged nor revered) because of his surname’s mundanity; it is one of Ireland’s most common, and was even more so in 1938. Indeed, this offers no hints regarding his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, which are to be dramatically exposed in the text’s opening lines. The title is therefore a meaningless symbol, hinting ironically at the inherent difficulties of expression which corroborate Murphy’s problematic social endeavours and consequent societal detachment. A similar effect, albeit inverted, is seen in Isherwood’s title. When Latinate cadence is rejected, the title’s meaning transfigures from “a man with no partner” to “just one man”, proleptically contradicting George’s subsequent characterisation: he is far more than ‘A Single Man’, but rather Isherwood’s everyman, ‘for in his humanity and desire for wholeness, George is no different from anyone else’ (Piazza, 1978, p.161). As with Murphy, the title of the novel runs counter to the nature of the protagonist, forming a juxtaposition which establishes contrariety as a base trope and subtly enhances the authors’ exploration of isolation and alienation.

Nowhere is this trope more apparent than in Beckett and Isherwood’s use of rhetorical abnormalities, which distort the novels’ harmony and subliminally disengage the reader. This is seen in Murphy’s first line, ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ (1), and is mirrored at the end of the novel when Beckett writes ‘the moon had been obliged to set’ (140), perhaps reflecting the life and death of the protagonist. Such diction establishes all events as taking place within ‘a closed system’ (64), a deterministic construction which transcends the normal boundaries of its form due to the abnormal acknowledgement of the sun lacking an ‘alternative’. Indeed, this is hardly unusual; all fiction is bound to a single path by necessity, as it is crafted by a person as opposed to being subject to the whims of cosmic chance. By drawing attention to this literary requirement Beckett parodies the novel’s fictional status and forces the disintegration of one’s original suspension of disbelief, establishing isolation as a theme by preventing full immersion in the story and segregating the reader from the protagonist. The semantic field of fatalism—‘condemned’ (1), ‘no alternative’ (1), ‘would have to’ (1)—reinforces this separation, as the reader is observing the novel as if through a looking glass, incapable of engagement or interaction with the characters. Manipulation of the novel’s form is a common modernist tradition, often used to emphasise the ambiguity of language and induce a hyperawareness of the novel’s fundamental falsehood, and Beckett embodies this unorthodoxy to full effect in Murphy, for as long as the reader is cognisant of their reading they will always be set apart from Murphy’s mind. ASM brings about a similar disengagement by opening the novel with the first person plural pronoun: ‘The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative’ (2). As in Murphy the reader is held apart from the action, resulting in a protagonist who is isolated and indistinct, an effect intensified by the dehumanising noun ‘creature’. The surety with which Isherwood uses the future tense—George ‘will struggle on and on’—also mirrors Murphy’s rule-bound universe, suggesting an unnatural determinism lurking beneath the ostensibly simple sentences; what Piazza refers to as ‘a superconscious, extraphenomenal aspect’ (Piazza, 1978, p.150) in the story’s reality. This leads to a dissonance which unnerves and distances the reader, marking an overlap in the authors’ methods.

However, there is a subtle difference; whereas Murphy’s ‘no alternative’ is entirely assured, ASM specifies that the ‘no alternative’ only applies to what George ‘can imagine’. Thus the fatalism is limited to the protagonist, revealing a distinction in Isherwood’s approach; his exploration of isolation is notably individual, and therefore surmountable, whereas isolation in Murphy is all-pervasive. This difference is illustrated clearly in Nabokov’s Pnin and Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Pnin’s isolation is personal, like George’s, centred around his struggle to fully integrate into a society which is hostile towards his Russian background. His name brings immediate attention to his foreignness, with the adjacency of ‘p’ and ’n’ creating a sound which is noticeably non-English. Joan offers an obscure acoustic image of his name—‘like a cracked ping pong ball’ (27)—and the narrator labels the sound as ‘a preposterous little explosion’ (27), showing Pnin’s unfamiliar nationality to be an isolating force in much the same way that homosexuality is for George. Both these plights are in part autobiographical, as Isherwood experienced social exclusion as a gay man and Nabokov as a Russian emigre, explaining the individual focus. By contrast, the voice of The Hollow Men mirrors Murphy in its impersonality, reflecting all humanity’s loss of societal virtue following the First World War, where more than 16 million deaths shook the foundations of Western civilisation. Eliot’s register is highly cyclical, using roughly 180 discrete words in a poem around 450 long, and the combination of anaphora and repeated phrasing gives the poem an inexhaustible monotony, likening it with Murphy’s untiring and aimless wandering about London. Furthermore, the recurring image of the ‘hollow’, ‘stuffed’ men, anonymised and oppressed by their ceaseless silence, combines with the unquestioning repetition of ‘this is the way the world ends’ in the final stanza to deprive the poem of all hope in a way that closely resembles Murphy’s omnipresent fatalism. It must be noted that Eliot’s method is drastically different, the poetic form meaning his notion of depersonalisation is highly condensed, but both texts differ markedly from the personalised language of Isherwood and Nabokov by reflecting worlds where man is lost and isolation is unavoidable.

Beckett’s skilful placement of semantic inconsistencies enhances this impression by subverting the ostensibly meticulous chronotope; every detail, including the moon, tides, and weather, aligns with that of 1935, and yet the first line is senseless. ‘The sun shone’ is a syntagm which implies personification due to use of the preterite, thereby indicating a choice being made by the sun, while ‘having no alternative’ reclaims this choice retroactively, transforming the sentence into a subtle oxymoron which undermines Beckett’s rigid order. In ASM there is a comparable split between the impersonal voice and the emotive language used to portray George’s grief. At first George has no identity, ‘the body […] brushes its hair’, ‘washes’, ‘shaves’, so that ‘these others’ may ‘be able to identify it’ (2). But the story doggedly progresses, refashioning itself until a distinguishing feature is provided: ‘It is called George’ (3). Immediately following this identification the reader is flooded with George’s emotional processes as he recalls that ‘Jim is dead. Is dead’ (4), the epizeuxis further emphasising his passion. Such sentimentality sits in direct antithesis with his anonymous uncloaking, making it difficult, if not impossible for the reader to avoid being alienated from him, and without knowledge of his personality there is no common ground to bridge the separation. Bristow views George as ‘a representative individual living in his own personal hell’ (Bristow, 1995, p.161), and at this stage he is entirely right; the reader recognises a familiar emotion—grief—yet is unable to break through his characterless shell in order to empathise. Isherwood has most likely implemented this method in order to elucidate the troubles faced by homosexuals prior to the novel’s publication in 1964. The term ‘homophobia’ would not be used for another five years, and homosexuality was classified in the USA as a psychiatric disorder until 1973. By suspending identification with a character who is fundamentally relatable, Isherwood mirrors the unjustified social isolation he experienced as a gay male.

The fact that the inconstancy of Murphy is primarily found in the technicalities as opposed to the characterisation, as it is in ASM, explains why it is considered a modernist work; the style is unquestionably avant-garde, breaking the strict realist conventions of Victorian literature with its chaotic and contradictory narrative. This distorts the setting and makes it highly absurd, following the Camusian definition of man ‘as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe’ (Abrams and Harpham, 2013, p.1). For example, when Murphy is introduced he sits alone, naked and tied up in his rocking chair—a seemingly regular practice—with ‘only the most local movements’ (5) possible, forcing the reader to question how the final scarves were secured without anyone else’s help. Furthermore, although ‘seven scarves held him in position’ (5), only six are actually listed. Such inconsistencies appear throughout and attest to Beckett’s construction of ‘an alien universe’, culminating in the impossibility of the gas leak that causes Murphy’s death; all other characters were occupied at this time, and Murphy himself is once more strapped to his chair. Erika states that it must be ‘the narrator/fabulist himself who can step out of the fictional world at will’ (http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/A15418/pdf), implying direct authorial involvement in the story and thence making Beckett a creator who is not just omniscient, but interventionist. Kennedy argues that these irregularities cause a ‘total loss of certainty concerning both the self and its language’ (Kennedy, 1989, p.14–), and they undoubtedly contribute to Beckett’s exploration of alienation; the lack of congruity between overall formulation and smaller details mean the reader is unable to fully grasp the story, resulting in a disconnected tone which inevitably influences how the characters are interpreted. Both Beckett and Isherwood therefore pervert their protagonist through structural juxtaposition, consequently isolating them from the reader and the world in which they exist. The intradiegetic narrator of Pnin exemplifies this duality as Nabokov morphs him into Pnin’s competitor, provoking doubt regarding the reliability of his account. Pnin acknowledges this himself during his interaction with Dr Barakan: ‘Now don’t believe a word he says, Georgiy Aramovich. He makes up everything’ (154). The reader’s understanding of Pnin is accordingly uncertain as anything he says could be altered and manipulated within the narrative, erecting an unassailable obstacle to his psyche. Pnin thus acts as an intermediary between both novels, combining the narrative unreliability of Murphy with George’s withheld identity, simultaneously demonstrating how these two features advance the exploration of isolation and alienation.

The minor incongruities which feature across both novels are seen more straightforwardly in brief but marked moments of comedic respite. These instances are especially welcome in Murphy, where the ubiquity of isolation could have easily become overbearing. Humour prevents the reader from becoming numb to the tragedy and ensures that the disconnection experienced remains distressing. Beckett recognised this fact during his struggle for publication; when asked to remove moments such as the chess game, he pointed out that ‘the wild and unreal dialogues […] cannot be removed without darkening and dulling the whole thing. They are the comic exaggeration of what elsewhere is expressed in elegy, namely, if you like, the Hermeticism of the spirit’ (Ackerley, 2010, p.24). Such ‘comic exaggeration’ is typical of Beckett and became renowned following the production of his most famous work, Waiting for Godot. In Murphy this overstatement is sempiternal due to its quest-like form; Murphy prowls innocently about London, chased by four characters whose motives for finding him are decidedly quixotic. The melodrama is supremely ironic given the pedestrian sequence of events—superficially it is the story of a jaded man who finds a job before an abrupt accident causes his death. Combined with frequently farcical neologisms (‘gambadoes’, ‘genustrupations’ (52)) there is an unmistakably tragicomic overtone which makes Murphy’s isolation and alienation all the more emphatic. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has a darkly comedic irony which mocks Prufrock’s loneliness similarly to how Beckett’s humour highlights Murphy’s misfortunes. The title of the poem is especially ironic, setting up a romantic expectation which fails to be delivered upon, as no expression of love is provided. There is also a sardonic element to the description of his dandyism; despite being middle aged ‘With a bald spot’ in the middle of his head, he is obsessively well-dressed: ‘My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,/ My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-’. Through this ironic contrast the reader achieves a more nuanced understanding of Prufrock’s self-consciousness and isolation, illustrating how comedy—no matter how muted—can help in the advancement of such themes. ASM does not share Murphy’s nihilism, but humour is still used in order to undermine George’s anxiety-ridden internal monologue. This is evinced during instances of free indirect discourse, such as him being ‘oppressed by awareness of the city below’ (88), an emotion which develops into an overwhelming image of the city ‘spread[ing] itself over the entire plan’, soon to be ‘drinking converted seawater’ before it finally dies ‘of over-extension’ (88). George’s depressed metaphor for mankind is curtly ended when he ‘looks out over Los Angeles like a sad Jewish prophet of doom, as he takes a leak’ (89), splitting his characterisation between the segregation associated with Judaism and the humorous inappropriateness of the subsequent colloquialism. As Bergman argues, ‘the individual, for Isherwood, is not a solid but instead a dynamic and complex amalgam of not entirely coherent or harmonised elements batched rather accidentally together’ (Bergman, 2004, p.66), an interpretation supported by the incongruity of George’s language. Isherwood’s use of humour is therefore at odds with Beckett’s; although it provides both novels with structural contrast, in Murphy it emphasises the protagonist’s isolation, whereas in ASM it adds diversity to George’s character.

The amalgamation of comedy and tragedy gives George a universal breadth which aids in his presentation as an everyman, thus balancing the narrative juxtapositions and allowing his isolation to be relatable. Such resonance develops throughout the novel, with gradually fewer scene changes slowing the pace to add weight to the final symbol of collectivism, rock pools: ‘You may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not’ (149). This parallels George’s character; like a rock pool he appears to be individual, separate, but is in fact merely a constituent of a far greater whole. Ultimately, then, Isherwood refutes the notion of ‘A Single Man’ in favour of human unity. The overall consequence of the techniques used is a valuable indication of the methods themselves, and the hopeful impression left by ASM distinguishes his approach from Beckett’s, thereby reflecting the authors’ differing formulations. Isherwood’s Vedantist ideology may well have driven this sentiment, with the Hindu philosophy stressing the idea of a universal consciousness—Brahman—permeating the essence of one’s individual Atman. This concept is in keeping with the progressive protests of the 1960s, where an idealistic counterculture challenged America’s historical individualism. Isherwood became increasingly involved in such politics during the four decades he spent in Los Angeles and his anti-egoism underlies George’s personality. Murphy offers none of ASM’s collectivist optimism, as the eponymous protagonist dies alone and irrelevant, ‘a pine of smoke’ (155) symbolically investing the landscape with a melancholic but insubstantial reminder of his absence. Despite the visual semblance of crescendo towards the final pages, ‘music MUSIC MUSIC’ (132) and ‘all. All. ALL’ (134) the clearest examples, Murphy’s death is immediately followed by the bathetic description of his ashes ‘swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glasses, the matches, the spits, the vomit’ (154), asyndeta intensifying its anticlimactic impression by disrupting the natural rhythm. Furthermore, his ‘seedy’ (50) solipsism is shown to be misguided; Celia returns to caring for her uncle, the remaining characters give up their chase, and the world carries on revolving in spite of him, illustrating his disconnect from reality and interminable isolation. By giving him such an ignoble end Beckett diminishes his value and prevents any resolution, maintaining alignment with the absurdist view of life’s inherent meaninglessness and ensuring a lingering sense of unease. Pnin shares this feature due to what Bowie describes as ‘duality reduced to unity’ (Bowie, 1986, p.256); by the end of the novel the narrator and Pnin have become indistinguishable, as he is on the same train which Pnin occupied in the story’s opening. Like Murphy there is no settlement, consolidating the protagonist’s isolation by distancing the reader from the novel.

How disconnection finds its genesis within the story marks a critical distinction between Isherwood and Beckett’s methods. In ASM it is plainly social; as Olson states, ‘the novel positions George and his [deceased] partner within the larger local community, and yet deliberately apart from it’ (Arnett and Arneson, 2014, p.189) with their home linked to the neighbourhood only by a small bridge, a setting which symbolises the couple’s metaphorical segregation. He is highly paranoid of how he is perceived by the community, believing ‘they are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them […] Among many other kinds of monster […] they are afraid of little me’ (22). Regardless, he still strives for connection, living vicariously through limited social interplay. When his student offers him a pencil sharpener, for example, George blushes ‘as if he has been offered a rose’ (81), an exaggerated reaction which reveals his desperation for human contact. Such a disposition is self-fulfilling, as he develops toxic tendencies which diminish his self-worth; exiting the hospital room of Jim’s ex-lover, he asserts through indirect speech that ‘he is leaving her world and thereby ceasing to exist’ (80), displaying a sense of rejection which results in his increasing withdrawal from society. This is similarly illustrated through the internal dialogue, as he refers to himself as ‘we’, ‘you’, and ‘our’—‘You are drunk. Oh, you stupid old thing, how dare you get so drunk? Well, now, listen: We are going to walk down those steps very slowly, and when we are at the bottom we are going straight home and upstairs and right into bed, without even brushing our teeth’ (118)—suggesting that he has transfigured himself into a multifaceted entity in order to compensate for his social alienation. It is telling that other characters have such minuscule roles; like George, the reader is unable to escape from the circuitous anxiety which saturates his consciousness. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night has a muted likeness with ASM, dealing with the ‘problem of a structured external life which does not seem to be “real” and an inner life whose profoundest level is of fragmentary glimpses that resist formulation’ (Sharpe, 1991, p.121). This fundamental conflict is reflected in its language; abiding by the unstructured connotations of ‘Rhapsody’, there is a nonuniform meter and sporadically placed rhymes, an almost catachrestic example of personification in the lines ‘The street-lamp sputtered,/ The street-lamp muttered,/ The street-lamp said’, and a diseased image of the moon with ‘a washed-out small pox that cracks her face’. The speaker’s vitiated mindset therefore alters his voice in a way that mirrors how George’s emotional distress poisons his perception of the world.

By contrast, disconnection in Murphy originates in the protagonist’s attempted withdrawal from the external world, by virtue of what Miller sees as ‘a defensive protest against the contingent social forces that constantly undermine his illusory autonomy’ (Miller, 1999, p.188). ‘Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’ (63), explaining his ostensible non-reliance on others. He apperceives his consciousness as detached, hence fabricating an extension of Cartesian dualism where his body is grouped in with the material realm from which he is alienated. However, the ‘large hollow sphere’ is penetrable. After Murphy complies to finding a job there is a recurring image of its disintegration, his coat described as a ‘punctured ball’ (141) and him ‘hissing’ (83) as he walks. This image endures once he finds a job at a mental asylum, where his room is sealed ‘except for the shuttered Judas’ (103). The room can be viewed as symbolic of his mind, with the ‘Judas’ a metaphor for the perforation of his self-sufficiency. From here onwards Murphy fails to achieve the isolation he seeks, even dreaming of ‘Hell. Heaven. Helen. Celia’ (100), indicating how he is being drawn towards reality. But even following this revelation he remains separate, as Beckett constructs the other characters as mere ‘puppets’ (71) who are used to emphasise Murphy’s singularity. Indeed, Neary states how ‘Our medians […] meet in Murphy’ (120), referencing a geometric discrepancy which undercuts his prior discussion of vertices posited on a circle’s circumference; the other characters of Murphy do not exist alongside Murphy but within him, reducing them to their social function. Beckett’s approach thus makes Murphy truly isolated, as he constitutes the only certain character of the novel, whereas George’s state is shown to be surmountable. This could well be a reflection of Beckett’s own loneliness in the years before the novel was written. Following his father’s death in 1933 the family home came to be marked by mourning and sequestration, driving him to buy a small London apartment and undergo two years of intense psychotherapy, and the solitariness associated with his experience is manifest in Murphy’s personality. Pnin provides a useful juxtaposition on this point; unlike Murphy, the protagonist’s mental and physical states are interactive. Pnin cannot afford to suffer as his cardiac fits remind him of the faces of those he loved, while past memories result in seizures when he is playing croquet, showing his inability to separate his mental and physical worlds. Murphy and Pnin are two ends of a spectrum, both alienated by their extremity.

In Murphy and A Single Man, isolation and alienation are equally central themes, but the manner of exploration is distinct. Although both novels possess a clear underlying incongruence, revealed immediately in their respective titles, Beckett expresses this feature through the technicalities rather than the characterisation, and disconnection within the novel arises as a result of Murphy’s psychological dualism as opposed to George’s social exclusion. These differing methods profoundly affect the overall impression; Beckett’s fragmented structure induces a division between the protagonist and the world at large—including that which exists beyond the structural framework—while Isherwood eventually allows the reader to identify with George, limiting his disengagement to within the story. Murphy is consequently more severe, with every detail tailored towards the advancement of its fruitless absurdism; even humour is simply a tool for emphasising the protagonist’s misfortune. It is telling that during the respective writing of these texts Beckett was living alone and unemployed, whereas Isherwood was deeply involved in the teachings of Vedantism. Indeed, each ending resembles the outlook of its author, pellucidly reflecting the broader distinction in structure, narrative, and characterisation. While Murphy’s ashes lie scattered across the floor of an unnamed bar, alone in death as in life, George becomes entirely unknown, transcending his individual essence into non-identity.

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