Reading Beckett via Kit Fine(10)

Chess

The chess episode helps us see this as it is the story’s most explicit piece of modal engineering. It is Beckett building a small formal universe in which Murphy’s ordinary ways of projecting possibilities, and of making the future intelligible by counterfactual rehearsal, are progressively disabled by a loop that refuses to count as progress. Murphy is forced to inhabit a space of purported options in which the transformations that normally certify movement are still available as motions, yet no longer count as steps that take him anywhere. The game becomes a laboratory for the difference between mere validity and genuine direction, between a move that is permitted and a move that is productive, between “you can do it” and “it gets you somewhere”. The horror is the argument from p to p, the blatant identity that looks like a step while being no step at all. Beckett makes that structure visible, then makes it felt, then lets it spread out into Murphy’s sensorium until it becomes the colourless “absence” he names as a rare treat. “And White surrenders” is the explicit outcome, and it arrives after a sequence of moves presented as numbered, annotated, almost pedantically classical, as if the book itself is turning into a score. The notes are not decorative, they are control knobs, and they tell you what the formal machine is doing. 

“The primary cause of all White’s subsequent difficulties” is pinned to an early decision, and later the commentary becomes brutally categorical: “Black has now an irresistible game.” So the text itself is already speaking in a register of structure first. The psychological facts come later as consequences of what the structure permits and forbids. The way to avoid a shopping list is to treat each phase of the move sequence as a different kind of transformation, then watch how Endon’s play makes transformations available while withdrawing the sense of direction that normally makes them count as progress. Early phase, the opening is an offer of ordinary counterfactual space. Beckett’s presentation implies a recognisable opening economy, and he even names what one might call a “debut”, “ingenious and beautiful”, and then immediately tags the opponent’s response as “ill judged”. Read that as the novel briefly granting Murphy the kind of world where “if I do this, then that follows” still looks like a live grammar, a space where counterfactual dependencies feel stable, so planning feels like planning. If I choose this line, then I can foresee pressures, exchanges, simplifications. That is the ordinary human use of counterfactuals: they generate traction. 

Then the mid phase, where Endon converts traction into reversible motion. You can see it in the texture of the move list, the recurrence of retreating pieces, the repeated returning of king, queen, rook, knight to adjacent squares, the sense that the board is being made to “ring the changes” without changing. Beckett makes the repetition blatant in the later corridor scene, where Endon cycles through permutations of “lit, indicated, extinguished”, then restarts with the light on, then recombines again, as if the same finite set of operations can be endlessly re-ordered into the appearance of novelty. That corridor passage is the game’s philosophical gloss. It says: here is a system where you can always do something, and where doing something can be described with precision, but where the something does not accumulate. It is a perfect cartoon of when the system allows reversibility in a way that threatens to collapse “progress” into a disguised identity. Beckett’s gloss on p to p is not merely “circular reasoning is bad”. It is the formal expression of a very specific dread: the feeling of having taken steps, made sacrifices, altered your configuration, and then discovering that the only thing you have proved is what you began with, that the world has silently re-labelled your motion as an identity. 

In Beckett’s scene, Murphy keeps making moves, and yet the commentary keeps pointing to the fact that the moves are not purchasing any new kind of position. The notes become almost cruel in their clarity: “The ingenuity of despair”, “No words can express the torment of mind”, “the termination of this solitaire is very beautifully played”. The word “solitaire” is lethal here. It tells you that the opponent is not really an opponent in the ordinary agonistic sense. Endon is playing a form of chess in which the other side’s agency is folded into a closed procedure. That is exactly the emotional profile of p to p when lived from the inside: you experience yourself as acting, yet the system treats you as merely participating in the re-derivation of what was already there. Beckett flags the following as a hinge in the machine: “At this point Mr Endon… turned his King and Queen’s Rook upside down, in which position they remained for the rest of the game.” This is not simply eccentricity or a sign of madness. It is a physical re-labelling of a piece as if the piece were no longer primarily a move-maker but a marker of a rule. The rook is being made into a sign for an orientation, and that orientation is “no longer aiming”. It is as if Endon is declaring, in the middle of the derivation, that certain transformations will continue to occur but will no longer be allowed to count as strong, no longer allowed to be the kind of step that licenses a genuine “therefore”. The rook still “is a rook” in the weak sense, it still participates in the calculus, but its upside-downness is a constant reminder that the calculus is being played under a different notion of what counts as advancement. 

This makes sense of another note that can otherwise look like comic pedantry. Beckett says that because Endon does not cry “Check!”, Murphy is “absolved… from attending to it”, but that attending would have been “to admit that the salute was adventitious.” The point is that what matters is not the legal fact of being in check, but the explanatory status of the check within the game’s world. A check that is not marked as such is treated as if it does not belong to the shared normative space of chess-as-communication. Fine keeps separating a structure that can be described from the structure that can be endorsed as doing the right kind of work. Beckett is staging a split between move legality and move meaning. Endon’s check is like a derivation step that is valid but does not function as a reason, because the interpersonal channel that would make it a reason is withdrawn. 

From here you can track the endgame sequence as a tightening noose of compossibility. Each move is still locally possible, but the set of moves that can jointly live together as a coherent plan shrinks until Murphy is left with what feels like options that sabotage one another. Murphy’s next move can be compossible with one threatened line, but not with the totality of constraints Endon has silently engineered. The sensation is of being invited to choose among worlds that cannot actually be made to cohere, worlds that cancel each other the moment you try to inhabit them. That is why the surrender is written as something like a metaphysical capitulation rather than a sporting loss. After the forty-third move, Murphy “gazed for a long time”, then lays his king on its side, then gazes again, and then his perception is hijacked by “the brilliant swallow-tail of Mr Endon’s arms and legs… till they saw nothing else”. 

This is where dread and the erotic sublimated weirdness become formally grounded rather than merely atmospherically asserted. The “finery” becomes an after-image, the pieces scatter with “a terrible noise”, and then comes the line that is almost a manifesto for an impossible-worlds reading: he begins to see “that colourlessness… being the absence… not of percipere but of percipi.” This is not “I no longer perceive” but “there is no longer being-perceived”, as if the world has stopped offering itself as an object of experience. That is a way of describing a modal collapse that is not merely psychological. The space of counterfactual grips, the space in which the world presents alternatives as answerable to agency, gives way to a Nothing that is “accidentless”, “One-and-Only”. It is as if Murphy is briefly delivered into a world with no live divergence, no branching, no meaningful “if”. A world where the only counterfactuals left are empty because there is no difference-making structure for them to track. 

Beckett’s numbered sequence accelerates into a pattern that looks like it is chasing its own tail: king steps, queen slides, knights return, rooks repeat. Then the “termination” is explicitly described as the finishing of a solitaire, “beautifully played”, which is a way of saying the ending is not an explosion but a closure of a circuit. You can even see how Beckett makes “progress” into a kind of parody. A note praises White’s “pertinacity” in struggling “to lose a piece”. Murphy’s agency has been demoted from trying to win to trying to make his losses count as losses, trying to get even the negative form of progress to register. That is the lived version of being trapped in a system where strong steps are disallowed. You cannot even properly fail, you can only circle. 

And then, the tulpa and doppelganger machinery becomes newly disciplined. Endon is not Murphy’s doppelganger in the sense of “a double”. He is closer to a tulpa-like externalisation of a rule Murphy half-wants: the wish for a perfectly closed, perfectly determinate, perfectly non-accidental pattern that would finally stop the exhausting labour of alternative-making. But because it comes as an encounter, it becomes uncanny. Endon is both other and not-other: he behaves “haphazard” yet is “determined by an amental pattern as precise as any of those that governed his chess.” 

That “amental pattern” is the tulpa’s heartbeat, a pattern that has withdrawn from ordinary mindedness yet continues to generate structure. It is like a reasoning system that still produces derivations while refusing the ordinary norms that make derivations feel like reasons shared between persons. 

So the chess game is the novel’s most explicit model of a progressive, noncircular ideal failing to secure the lived sense of progress. Murphy’s dread is the dread of identity masquerading as movement. The erotic weirdness is not an add-on, it is the libidinal charge of being confronted with an opponent whose “finery” becomes the only visible object, as if desire has been stripped down to a single, rigid, dazzling figure that blocks the world. The uncanny is the formal experience of being inside a space of possibilities where the counterfactuals still proliferate, yet none of them can become compossible with a future you can inhabit. 

There’s a sense in which the chess game is introduced by Beckett as an object that already knows more than Murphy does. The game unfolds as exposure. Beckett tells us very early that “the primary cause of all White’s subsequent difficulties” lies in a specific early choice. This is a declaration that the space of future possibilities has already been constrained in a way Murphy cannot undo. What is at stake is not causal determinism but modal narrowing. The initial configuration admits a wide set of legal continuations, but only a very narrow set of compossible continuations that preserve the possibility of progress. Murphy chooses a line that remains locally legal while globally self-undermining. Murphy has chosen a path that preserves weak implication while undermining strong grounding. 

From this point on, each of his future moves will be permitted by the rules of chess, but fewer and fewer of them will function as reasons for believing that a winning or even stabilising outcome remains live. The game has not become impossible. It has become directionless. Beckett repeatedly uses evaluative language that is oddly asymmetrical. Moves are described as “ingenious”, “beautiful”, “accurate”, yet the overall trajectory is described as “irresistible” for Black. This is the key to the structure. Local brilliance is compatible with global futility. A move can satisfy all local constraints and still fail to ground any meaningful future. As the opening develops, Beckett emphasises White’s increasing need to respond rather than initiate. This is a modal shift. 

Murphy’s moves become increasingly reactive. Reaction is already a weakened form of grounding. To react is to let the opponent’s move fix the space of relevant alternatives. Murphy’s agency is being converted from a grounding source into a constraint-satisfaction mechanism. He is selecting from residues. Phrases like “forced”, “inevitable”, and “only move” begin to appear. These do not indicate conditional necessity relative to an already narrowed modal field. Something can be necessary given a background that is itself contingent. Murphy’s tragedy is that he keeps mistaking conditional necessity for absolute closure. He experiences compulsion, and begins to treat it as fate. Endon’s play intensifies this confusion by introducing reversible transformations. Beckett draws attention to repeated manoeuvres in which pieces advance only to retreat, or shift squares only to return. In ordinary chess, such manoeuvres are meaningful when they reconfigure pressure. Here, Beckett insists that pressure is not accumulating. The board is being rearranged without being re-oriented. This is the if p then p structure instantiated spatially. A transformation occurs, but the resulting position is explanatorily equivalent to the prior one. 

Circular explanation becomes a lived trap. Murphy is making moves that are not mistakes, but that function as identity morphisms in a system that pretends to be progressive. The corridor passage Beckett inserts, where Endon walks back and forth switching the light on and off in different permutations, is not an aside. It is a literalisation of the chessboard’s logic. Beckett enumerates the combinations as if he were listing truth-table rows. All combinations are exhausted. Nothing new emerges. The system is finite, closed, and endlessly iterable. The world has completed its combinatorial space without generating direction. This is why Endon’s behaviour is described as both “haphazard” and governed by “an amental pattern as precise as any of those that governed his chess.” Endon is not calculating in the sense of projecting outcomes. He is executing a pattern that does not require anticipation. Fine would say that Endon’s play is non-counterfactual. It does not rely on “if I do this, then that will happen”. It simply unfolds a structure. 

This brings us to the most infamous gesture in the game: Endon turning his king and queen’s rook upside down. Read literally, this violates no rule. The pieces still occupy their squares. Their legal moves remain unchanged. Nothing about the game’s syntax is altered. But Beckett insists on the visual transformation, and insists that the pieces remain inverted for the rest of the game. This is a declaration about what kind of objects these pieces now are. Endon is re-marking certain elements as no longer playing a grounding role. The rook still moves like a rook, but its upside-downness signals that its movements no longer count as aimed. They are no longer teleological. They no longer participate in a narrative of advance. This is a physical analogue of the separation between semantic role and metaphysical function. The piece retains its rules but loses its directional authority. 

The next crucial annotation concerns check. Beckett notes that Endon does not announce “Check!”, and that Murphy therefore feels “absolved” from attending to it, since to attend would be “to admit that the salute was adventitious”. This is one of the most compressed philosophical moments in the novel. A check is not merely a position. It is a communicative act. It binds the opponent by declaring relevance. Endon withholds that declaration. The check exists in the weak sense, but it is deprived of its grounding force as a reason for action. A fact can obtain without functioning as a ground. Endon’s check is real, but it does not count. Murphy is thus trapped in a world where constraints exist but refuse to present themselves as authoritative. 

As the game progresses, Beckett’s annotations grow colder. He begins to praise not White’s prospects but Black’s “irresistible” control. This word matters. Irresistibility here does not mean violence. It means the disappearance of relevant alternatives. Murphy is forced because the system has been arranged so that any alternative he considers either collapses immediately or leads back into the same loop. Murphy is faced with moves that are pairwise legal but jointly incoherent as a plan. He can save a piece here only by abandoning structure there. He can delay here only by accelerating loss elsewhere. The future fragments into mutually cancelling branches. Choice becomes an exercise in selecting which impossibility to inhabit. Beckett describes Murphy’s “pertinacity” in attempting “to lose a piece”. This is the formal endpoint of a system in which even losing has become difficult. Loss normally grounds progress by simplifying the position. Here, loss itself is denied grounding force. Murphy cannot even make failure count. Negative progress has been blocked along with positive progress. The system admits no asymmetry whatsoever. 

The endgame is described explicitly as “the termination of this solitaire”, and Beckett adds “very beautifully played”. Solitaire names a system that preserves the appearance of opposition while eliminating its metaphysical substance. Endon is not playing against Murphy in any deep sense. He is playing out a closed structure in which Murphy’s moves are inputs that do not alter the output. At the moment of surrender, Murphy’s perceptual field collapses onto Endon’s “finery”, which becomes an after-image, a rigid, dazzling form that blocks the world. This is not aesthetic excess. It is the perceptual correlate of modal collapse. When counterfactual space vanishes, perception loses depth. The world ceases to offer affordances. 

Worlds without divergence becomes literal here. Murphy’s vision is reduced to a single, non-navigable object. The pieces scatter “with a terrible noise”. This is the sound of a system disintegrating because it has completed itself. The subsequent experience Murphy names, “that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat”, and which he glosses as “the absence not of percipere but of percipi”, is the final metaphysical yield of the game. The world stops presenting itself as something to be perceived as this rather than that. A world without difference-makers. 

Seen this way, the chess game is the novel in miniature, but more than that, it is the proof object. It demonstrates, under controlled conditions, what happens when a system preserves legality, variety, motion, and even beauty, while quietly disabling grounding, counterfactual traction, and compossibility. Murphy loses because he has encountered a structure that realises his own deepest wish, a world where nothing has to matter, and discovered that such a world can only be inhabited as annihilation. 

There are three kinds of entities. First, there are positions, which are complete board configurations at a time. Second, there are moves, which are transitions between positions. Third, there are annotations, Beckett’s explicit evaluative comments, which we must treat not as commentary but as meta-level constraints on how the system is to be interpreted. Crucially, Endon is not part of the ontology as an intentional agent in the usual sense. He does not function as a source of reasons. Murphy initially tries to treat him as such, but the novel systematically frustrates that interpretation. Endon belongs instead to the realisation mechanism of the system. He executes transitions but does not ground them. This will matter later. 

Now consider the modal space. In ordinary chess analysis, the modal space consists of all legally reachable positions from a given position. Beckett does not deny this. At every stage, Murphy has multiple legal moves. So the system is not deterministically closed in the weak sense. However among the legally reachable positions, only some are progressively admissible, meaning that they preserve the possibility of future grounding. Formally, let S be the set of all legal positions. Let R be the move relation, where R(s, s′) holds if s′ is reachable from s by a legal move. This is standard. Beckett’s intervention is to add a constraint G on sequences of positions, where G(s₀, s₁, …, sn) holds only if the sequence supports non-circular explanation, that is, if later positions are grounded in earlier ones in a way that is not merely identity-preserving. Murphy believes he is navigating S via R. In fact, he is navigating S under the illusion that G still applies, while Endon’s play has quietly collapsed G. 

This brings us to grounding relations. Grounding is asymmetric, explanatory, and non-circular. One state grounds another if the latter holds in virtue of the former. In the chess game, grounding corresponds to what we ordinarily call strategic explanation. A move grounds a later advantage. A sacrifice grounds initiative. A concession grounds simplification. Beckett shows us, move by move, that Murphy’s grounding relations fail. This failure is not global from the start. Early in the game, Murphy still believes that certain moves explain later pressure. Beckett’s annotation identifying the “primary cause” of White’s difficulties marks the precise moment grounding becomes defective. From that point on, Murphy’s moves still cause later positions in the causal sense, but they no longer ground them in the explanatory sense. 

This is the heart of the formal tragedy. Murphy is moving in a world where causation persists but grounding has evaporated. Now we can see why Beckett’s repeated emphasis on “forced” moves is philosophically exact. Forcedness is modal narrowness, not explanatory depth. We now reach looping and non-compossibility. As the game progresses, Beckett highlights repeated manoeuvres, reversals, and spatial symmetries. These are not decorative. They indicate that the system has entered a region where sequences of moves preserve equivalence classes of positions. Formally, define an equivalence relation ≈ on S such that s ≈ s′ if s and s′ are indistinguishable with respect to future grounding potential. Beckett shows us that after a certain point, Murphy’s moves merely carry the game from one equivalence class member to another. R continues to operate, but all reachable futures remain ≈-equivalent. This is looping in Fine’s sense, but not simple repetition. It is structural looping. The system generates novelty at the level of configuration while remaining invariant at the level that matters for explanation. 

This is why Beckett can praise the beauty of individual moves while insisting on the inevitability of the outcome. Murphy experiences this as paralysis without stasis. He is active, but his actions cancel one another at the level of grounding. Every attempt to save one feature destroys another that was tacitly required for explanation. The future fragments into mutually exclusive pseudo-possibilities. Now we can address the p→p structure precisely. An argument from p to p is trivially valid but explanatorily void. Beckett realises a non-trivial analogue. Murphy’s moves are not literally identity moves. The board changes. Pieces relocate. Time passes. Yet the explanatory structure of the game satisfies a strong analogue of p→p. 

The system permits motion without progress, difference without direction, legality without grounding. This is the non-trivial p→p: not syntactic identity, but modal identity under explanatory collapse. Endon’s inversion of the rook and king makes this explicit. The pieces retain their movement rules, so R is unchanged. But their inversion signals that they no longer participate in grounding relations. They have become markers of pure legality stripped of teleology. They are entities whose essences have been preserved while their grounding roles have been withdrawn. 

Finally, consider surrender. In a normal game, surrender acknowledges a grounded asymmetry. One player recognises that the opponent’s position explains future outcomes. Here, Murphy’s surrender is anomalous. It is not grounded in a decisive threat. It is grounded in the recognition that grounding itself has failed. The system has reached a state where explanation can no longer be projected forward. Murphy experiences the absence not of perception but of being perceived. The world ceases to present itself as a space of difference-makers. The modal field flattens. Counterfactuals die. There is nothing left that could have been otherwise in a way that matters. That is the formal reconstruction. 

The chess game is a realised model of a world where legality, variation, and even elegance survive the death of grounding. It is not an allegory of madness. It is a demonstration of what happens when a system satisfies every local constraint while globally cancelling the conditions of explanation. The game thus is a local laboratory in which legality survives, motion continues, time passes, pieces move, and yet progress, in the sense of direction in reasons, has thinned to a kind of optical effect. 

Worstward Ho and Minimalism as P → P

 Once that is in place, Beckett’s later minimal prose reads like a further contraction of the same formal space. In Murphy the relation R, the move relation, remains rich, the world offers many micro transitions, even when grounding has begun to fail. In the late texts, the world keeps shrinking the set S of states that feel available, and it keeps tightening the admissible transformations, until the very idea of a well stocked modal neighbourhood begins to evaporate. 

Worstward Ho, in particular, feels like the chess game after the board has been stripped of most pieces, then stripped of the board’s edges, then stripped of the confidence that there were ever edges. What remains is still a space of states, but it is a sparse, repetitious, self reissuing space in which the principal event is the reappearance of the same structural demand, say it again, try again, and the same structural failure, no new grounding, no deepening, only a kind of compulsive reformation of a sentence world. 

Think of a progressive logic as needing a distinction between a step that merely preserves and a step that makes progress, a step that counts as strong rather than weak. In the chess analysis Murphy is trapped in sequences where the successive positions are connected by permissible steps, yet the system’s strong transformations, the ones that would carry explanatory weight, no longer accumulate. Worstward Ho feels like the same phenomenon migrated from game play into utterance. The prose performs transformations, but the transformations rarely cash out into new grounding. It is as if the text lives in a space where most inference is reversible, most steps threaten to fold back, and the only way to keep anything like direction is by forcing an artificial notion of progress, a ritualised push. 

This is why those late formulations feel like looping without mere repetition. The sentence goes forward by shaving itself down, then restaging itself, then trying to stage a smaller version again, as though the only kind of direction available is a minimising direction, an ascent by subtraction. Direction is not a psychological feeling of forwardness. Direction is a property of a transformation system. The late style can be read as a transformation system in which strong steps have become rare, and the text survives by generating a thin, almost mathematical surrogate for strength, a procedural insistence, an insistence that functions like a rule even when it yields no grounded novelty. 

Once you see that, the chess game ceases to be a mere emblem inside Murphy. It becomes a model of Beckett’s later procedure. The game displays a world in which local moves continue while global progress, in the strong sense, fails. Worstward Ho displays a language in which local rephrasings continue while global progress, in the strong sense, fails. The bridge is formal. Murphy still has a crowded modal space, full of legal micro alternatives, and the horror arrives when those alternatives no longer organise into an explanatory trajectory. 

Worstward Ho compresses the modal space itself until the text is almost nothing but the attempt to secure a trajectory in a space that keeps refusing to supply one. The contrast between Murphy as a failed inhabitant of the p to p structure and Endon as a successful inhabitant can be treated as an ontological difference in stance rather than a character judgement. Murphy’s p to p is non trivial because the surface differs while the explanatory level returns to itself. He experiences that return as loss. The reason is that Murphy continues to demand grounding, continues to treat the game as a domain in which he can build a ladder of reasons, a sequence in which earlier steps explain later steps. When the system begins to behave like a progressive logic deprived of its strong theorems, Murphy keeps trying to smuggle strength back in through interpretation. He reads positions as if they promised a direction, he reads Endon’s play as if it expressed a strategic essence, and he reads his own replies as if they could restore a compossible future. 

Endon’s success is the success of inhabiting the weak layer without yearning for the strong. Endon lives at the level of legality, pattern, rhythm, and the beauty of permitted transitions, with no pressure to treat those transitions as grounded steps in an explanatory ascent. This is why Endon is experienced by Murphy as at once luminous and terrifying. Luminous because the moves seem pure, terrifying because they drain the game of the very thing Murphy uses to locate himself, namely the sense that a future can be explained by a present, and that the present can be justified by a past. Murphy’s stance assumes that the space of possibilities is organised by essences that support grounding. Endon’s stance treats the space of possibilities as sufficient in itself, a space of states whose internal permutations carry no demand for further metaphysical underwriting. 

Murphy approaches Endon as if Endon were a person in the familiar sense, an agent with reasons, a mind to be mirrored, a centre to be met. In that approach, Endon becomes a kind of tulpa generated by Murphy’s metaphysical need, a figure made to house the missing grounding. Murphy projects a strong structure onto Endon and then suffers when Endon refuses to carry it. Endon, by contrast, appears almost like a doppelganger or tulpa of agency, agency’s shape without agency’s grounding role, a body that performs transitions while withholding the explanatory commitments Murphy expects. The uncanny force comes from this near match. The figure looks compossible with the ordinary world of strategy and reasons, and yet it belongs to a neighbouring modal region in which those commitments do not bind. 

That is non-compossibility in an intimate register. Murphy’s world and Endon’s world share the same board, the same pieces, the same legal relation R, and yet the two worlds fail to cohere at the level that matters to Murphy, the level of strong transformation, the level of why. Endon’s success then reads as a kind of modal serenity. He dwells in a weakly connected space and does not try to force it into a progressive structure. Murphy’s failure reads as the refusal to relinquish progress, the refusal to accept that in this local universe the only available arguments are, in effect, of the p to p kind, transitions that bring you back to yourself under a different mask. Murphy keeps trying to turn weak theorems into strong ones. Endon simply plays. 

Murphy’s death scene uses the same machinery, treating it as the terminal consequence of a world in which grounding collapses while local transitions persist. Here it helps to be literal. The death is not simply an event after the chess game. It is the continuation of the same structural condition in a different medium. In the game, Murphy is confronted with a sequence in which he can move, yet cannot accumulate. In the death, Murphy enters a sequence in which he can still perform micro actions, preparations, adjustments, movements of body and object, and yet the world’s strong connections to him, the ones that would make those actions explanatory steps in a life, have been thinned to almost nothing. The scene reads like the final tightening of the transformation system. The set S of salient states collapses to a narrow corridor, and the only remaining moves are moves that preserve the corridor rather than open it. Causal succession remains. One thing leads to another. Yet the feeling that one thing holds in virtue of another, the feeling that the present is supported by reasons, and that a future is supported by the present, has already been eroded. 

That erosion is what makes the scene feel like a loop. The fatal sequence is a chain of events, yet it also has the shape of a return, because the relevant explanatory content keeps collapsing back into a small set of invariants. A body, a room, an object, a mechanical relation, a narrow channel of possible outcomes. The system no longer offers rich counterfactuals. It offers only minor variations on the same ending. This is also where “impossible worlds” becomes an interpretative lever. 

Murphy’s inner orientation, the desire for a sealed mental space, the wish to live in a private topology where the world’s demands do not bite, can be modelled as a reach toward a state space whose elements are not compossible with the ordinary public world. The desire itself forms a kind of counterfactual pressure, a continual “if only the world were otherwise” that begins as fantasy, then becomes a guiding constraint. In the death scene, that counterfactual pressure meets the physical world’s ruthless lack of accommodation. The result is not simply failure. It is a catastrophic mismatch between two modal spaces that cannot be fused. A private space that wants to be complete, self grounding, closed under its own transitions, and a public space that remains open, contingent, and indifferent. Their attempted fusion generates the sense of impossibility, as though the scene were taking place in a world that cannot exist, and yet does, because the narrative has placed us exactly at the interface where compossibility breaks down. 

We can say this. Let W be Murphy’s attempted world, characterised by an internal transformation system that promises a kind of closure, a world in which the “next” follows from the “now” without the messy interruption of other agents, other claims, other demands. Let V be the actual world of the novel’s surfaces, where bodies, institutions, objects, and accidents participate. The chess game already shows that even within V, there are local regions where explanatory progress collapses. The death scene shows what happens when Murphy tries to relocate his being into W while remaining materially in V. The combined system has transitions, because events occur, yet it lacks a coherent grounding profile, because the explanatory principles of W and V fail to align. This produces an ending that feels both fated and absurd. Fated, because once the spaces are misaligned the corridor narrows rapidly. Absurd, because nothing like a noble explanation arrives to seal it. 

Murphy begins by wanting an identity of mind with itself, a p that implies p, a Berkeleyan self that can return to itself without remainder. The chess game gives him a p to p in the wrong register, a return under motion where explanation fails. The death gives him a final p to p in the bleakest register, the world’s reduction of him to a minimal invariant, an element that no longer participates in progressive transformations. It is not that nothing happens. It is that what happens no longer constitutes progress in the strong sense, and the novel has trained us to feel, with exactness, what that difference means.

Next: Theology

Previously: Murphy (8), Murphy (6), Murphy (5), Murphy (4) Murphy (3), Murphy (2), Murphy(1), Introduction, Criticism