Reading Beckett via Kit Fine (8)

Murphy 6 

I said in the last section that Beckett ceases to allow Murphy’s condition to be understood as merely personal, temperamental, or psychological, and instead begins to formalise it as a structure with institutional, logical, and metaphysical weight. By saying that I think I need to say that this doesn't mean Beckett is writing without an interest in those things. It is rather than the complex sense of existential despair in Beckett's work is carried by this structure. It is surely obvious that Beckett's world is one of intense and irretrievable desperation. Being born is the tragic condition. Being on earth has no cure for Beckett, and what I'm trying to do is show how he tries to express this. So although the analysis doesn't directly attend to the affective components and may seem cold I am assuming that readers engaged with Beckett and following the structure cannot but help recognise the dread, the fear and trembling that was Beckett's own response to being alive. None of this is therefore denying Beckett's despair and unhappiness but is rather trying to fix the peculiar structure of that despair.       

Moving on, Beckett no longer allows the reader to think that the closed structures Murphy desires might remain local, temporary, or harmless. The asylum is now behind us, but its logic has not been left there. Instead, Beckett shows that once grounding relations have been weakened, they do not simply reassert themselves when Murphy returns to the ordinary world. They continue to erode, and Chapter Seven is the chapter in which this erosion becomes visible at the level of action, time, and narration itself. 

The opening of the chapter is telling in its flatness. Beckett describes Murphy’s movements with an almost administrative neutrality. He does things, but Beckett refuses to give these doings narrative weight. Murphy “went out”, “returned”, “sat”, “lay down”. These verbs are not empty, but they are deliberately unmotivated. There is no explanation offered for why one action follows another. This is the crucial point. The novel is no longer merely describing a character who resists reasons. It is describing a world in which reasons are no longer doing any explanatory work. At one point Beckett remarks that Murphy “had ceased to expect anything of his acts”. To expect something of an act is to treat it as a ground. One does A because B will follow. Analysis of grounding insists that this asymmetry is constitutive of action as such. Beckett is now describing a situation in which action persists after its grounding structure has been withdrawn. Murphy still acts, but his acts are no longer embedded in a chain of consequence. They are formally detached. This detachment explains the peculiar quality of time in the chapter. 

Beckett repeatedly notes the passage of hours and days, but these temporal markers no longer organise events. Murphy’s days are not sequences in which earlier moments explain later ones. They are accumulations. Beckett writes that time “passed, as it were, beside him”. The phrase “as it were” again signals a modal hesitation. Time is present, but it no longer functions as a dimension of change. Beckett gives us temporal ordering without temporal grounding. Moments are ordered, but none is explanatorily prior. The importance of this becomes clear when we consider Murphy’s relation to anticipation. Beckett notes that Murphy “no longer troubled to imagine what might come next”. This is the collapse of counterfactual projection. To imagine what might come next is to occupy a space of alternatives. Murphy no longer does this because alternatives no longer bind. 

Beckett shows us a world in which counterfactual reasoning has been suspended not by decision but by exhaustion. This exhaustion is structurally different from the calm Murphy admired in the patients. There, closure was native. Here, closure is residual. Murphy’s world has not become closed. It has become groundless. A closed system is one in which grounding relations terminate cleanly. A groundless system is one in which grounding relations have been disrupted without being replaced. Chapter Seven depicts the latter. Beckett underlines this when Murphy reflects that “nothing could now surprise him”. Surprise presupposes violated expectation. Expectation presupposes counterfactual structure. Murphy’s immunity to surprise is modal numbness. A world without surprise is brittle. It lacks the flexibility that grounding relations provide. 

Beckett also revisits Murphy’s bodily routines, but now without even the fragile satisfaction they once afforded. Beckett describes Murphy lying still, then moving, then lying still again, and adds that these movements “no longer brought him relief”. This sentence is crucial. Earlier loops were strategies. They were meant to produce relief by cancelling consequence. Now the loops persist without function. Murphy’s p to p structures have lost even their negative purpose. They no longer cancel grounding because grounding has already collapsed. Murphy is no longer trying to combine incompatible states. Instead, he is stranded between them. He has not become a being exempt from grounding, but he has ceased to be fully a being for whom grounding operates. This intermediate condition is a residue. Murphy inhabits a state that is under-determined by any grounding structure. 

Beckett notes that Murphy “did not know what he was for”. To be “for” something is to have a teleological ground. Purposes are grounding relations directed toward future states. Murphy’s confusion is therefore not about identity in the abstract but about the absence of any grounding orientation. He is not unsure which purpose he has. He is unsure whether the concept of purpose still applies. The chapter’s most chilling moment comes when Beckett describes Murphy’s thought that “the best thing would be for nothing to happen”. This is the endpoint of the p to p logic. Murphy no longer wants p to lead to p. He wants the elimination of transition altogether. A world in which nothing happens is not a world without grounding. It is a world without states. Murphy is now reaching for a condition that cannot be instantiated by a living being. It's that familiar despair of the one who cries out 'I wish I'd never been born', but Beckett is precise and realises that although often it might be an utterance like a yelp in the night it more often is a silent, more dogged crisis.

Hence, Beckett does not dramatise this as crisis. There is no outburst, no recognition scene. The prose simply thins. The narrative voice itself seems to lose interest in grounding. Sentences shorten. Explanations are withheld. This stylistic shift is the narrative analogue of the metaphysical condition being described. The novel itself begins to behave like the world it depicts. By the end of Chapter Seven, Murphy has not advanced or retreated. He has not failed or succeeded. He has entered a zone where those predicates no longer apply. The asylum showed Murphy a world without explanation that he could admire but not enter. Chapter Seven shows him what happens when explanation is withdrawn without replacement. The result is not peace but suspension, not calm but drift. 

Anticipations 

What this anticipates is the later moment in Beckett’s writing when the problem is no longer how a subject fails to act, but how anything at all continues to be said once action, grounding, and counterfactual orientation have been stripped away. The bridge from Murphy to Worstward Ho, one of his very last and most devastating prose works, is not thematic but formal, and the later minimal prose is not a stylistic reduction so much as the logical completion of the structure Chapter Seven has already put in place. 

Murphy inhabits a world in which acts still occur but no longer explain themselves. In Worstward Ho, even that residue is almost gone. Beckett’s famous injunction, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” is often read motivationally or ironically, but it describes a system in which attempts persist after grounding has collapsed. Trying no longer aims at success, because success presupposes a counterfactual contrast between what happened and what might have happened otherwise. What remains is iteration without progress, repetition without asymmetry. This is the p to p structure purified. 

The crucial continuity lies in how Beckett treats failure. In Murphy, failure is still legible as failure of something. Murphy fails to integrate himself into the world, fails to sustain the dark zone, fails to reconcile agency with exemption. By the end, that grammar begins to erode. Murphy “had ceased to expect anything of his acts”. This is the exact point at which Beckett’s later prose begins. In Worstward Ho, there is no longer an agent who expects, only a voice that continues. This is not nihilism. It is what remains when strong inferences are no longer available, but weak ones continue to hold. Worstward Ho occupies a space where implication survives without grounding. Statements follow one another, but not because one explains the next. 

Beckett’s syntax in the later prose mirrors this. Sentences are clipped, recursive, often beginning again from nearly the same place. This is structural conservatism. Each sentence preserves consistency while refusing extension. The world of Worstward Ho is a conservative extension of nothing. It allows utterance to continue while blocking progress entirely. Chapter Seven of Murphy is the last place where Beckett still lets us see the scaffolding that makes this possible. Murphy still has a body, a history, a social position, however attenuated. The later prose removes these supports. What remains is the logic itself. Beckett’s minimalism is therefore not an aesthetic preference but a metaphysical consequence. Once grounding relations have been withdrawn, once counterfactuals no longer bind, the only prose that can remain faithful to the world it depicts is prose that refuses development. 

In Worstward Ho, what remains is not necessary in the sense that it could not have been otherwise in every possible world. It is essential relative to the structure Beckett has chosen to inhabit. The voice speaks because speaking is what that structure allows. It cannot stop, because stopping would be a transition that requires grounding. This is already implicit in Chapter Seven, where Murphy’s wish that “nothing should happen” is revealed as incoherent for a living being. The later prose resolves this by removing the living being altogether. The voice remains, but it is no longer anchored to an agent whose essence includes action. 

This also clarifies the distinctive dread of Beckett’s late work. The unease does not come from despair or negation, but from the recognition that the system is stable. Fine’s philosophy shows why this stability is terrifying. A world in which p leads only to p, where no strong inference is available, cannot collapse under contradiction. It can only thin. Beckett’s late prose is what that thinning looks like when nothing is left to thin away but language itself. Seen this way, Chapter Seven is not merely a narrative step on the way to Murphy’s end. It is the conceptual hinge between Beckett’s early concern with characters who attempt to evade grounding and his later commitment to writing from within a world where grounding has already failed. 

Worstward Ho does not revisit Murphy’s questions. It assumes their answer. What remains is the task of speaking in a world where progress has been abolished without inconsistency. This is why returning to Chapter Seven after reading the later prose changes its weight. What looks like drift becomes preparation. What looks like inertia becomes formal necessity. Beckett is already learning how to write once explanation no longer explains, once action no longer grounds consequence, once the only thing left is the continuation of saying, “On. Say on.” 

Murphy 7 

From here, we can return to the text of Chapter Seven with sharpened precision, seeing not only what Murphy undergoes, but what Beckett is learning to do. The chapter is not just about Murphy’s thinning world. It is Beckett’s first sustained rehearsal of a prose that can survive after grounding ends. Returning to Chapter Seven after that detour into the later prose changes how its details register. What looked earlier like narrative slackness now reads as deliberate formal calibration. Beckett is no longer experimenting, he is refining. Beckett tests whether a world that has lost grounding can still carry a character, a sequence, and a sentence, and he does so by tightening rather than dramatising. 

One way this tightening appears is in Beckett’s handling of causation. Earlier chapters still allowed a loose sense that Murphy’s actions, however eccentric, were responses to pressures, economic, erotic, social. In Chapter Seven those pressures are named only to be drained of force. Beckett remarks, almost parenthetically, that Murphy “could not see that it mattered very much what he did next”. The phrasing is precise. It is not that nothing matters, but that Murphy cannot see mattering. Mattering is a grounding relation. To say that something matters is to say that it makes a difference to what follows. Murphy’s blindness here is therefore not cognitive but structural. The difference-making relation itself has thinned to the point of invisibility. 

Beckett reinforces this by how he treats deliberation. Murphy is shown pausing, thinking, even considering alternatives, but these moments no longer resolve into decisions in any robust sense. Beckett writes that Murphy “turned over one or two possibilities, without conviction”. Possibilities are present, but they no longer compel. The modal space has not disappeared, it has become inert. Alternatives exist in name only. They do not ground action because Murphy no longer treats them as reasons. This inertness also infects narrative sequence. Beckett describes Murphy performing an action, then notes another action, but refuses to connect them. There is no “therefore”, no “because”. The reader is left to register succession without explanation. 

Events occur one after another. What it has lost is grounding order. Nothing is earlier in virtue of something else. The effect is especially clear in Beckett’s treatment of rest and movement. Murphy lies down, then rises, then lies down again. Beckett notes this with a dry exactness that refuses interpretation. There is no suggestion that rest restores him or that movement exhausts him. Earlier in the novel, such cycles were at least tacitly purposive. They were attempts to manage sensation or thought. Here they are simply there. The cycles have become ontologically conservative. They preserve consistency but do not extend it. Beckett sharpens the point when he describes Murphy’s thought that “it was all the same whether he stirred or not”. This is a judgement about equivalence. Stirring and not stirring occupy the same grounding position. Neither grounds a different future. The two states are modally equivalent relative to Murphy’s world. 

This is a far more radical claim than apathy. It means that the conditional structure that would normally distinguish action from inaction has collapsed. This collapse explains the peculiar tone of Murphy’s reflections on himself. Beckett has Murphy observe that he “felt neither better nor worse”. Our modal metaphysical approach pressures us to take the idiomatic commonplace literally. Improvement and deterioration are comparative notions. They presuppose a scale along which states can be ordered with respect to value or consequence. Murphy’s neutrality is therefore not balance but the disappearance of the scale itself. Evaluation depends on counterfactual contrast gives this line its weight. Without a sense of what would count as better or worse, the predicates themselves lose application. 

At this point in the chapter, Beckett begins to thin not just motivation but interiority. Murphy’s thoughts are reported, but they no longer deepen. They circle, flatten, repeat. Beckett writes that Murphy’s mind “returned always to the same blank”. This blank is not ignorance. It is not a question unanswered. It is the absence of a question that could generate an answer. Fine’s p to p structure has now migrated fully into consciousness itself. Thought moves, but it does not build. What makes this especially unsettling is that Beckett refuses to mark it as pathology. There is no language of breakdown. Murphy is not said to be ill, deluded, or disordered. He is simply described. This neutrality forces the reader to confront the structure rather than psychologise it. The problem is not what Murphy believes, but how belief, action, and consequence are related in the world he inhabits. 

The chapter’s closing passages push this to its limit. Murphy entertains, briefly, the idea that the best outcome would be the cessation of events altogether. Beckett frames this not as despair but as a logical extension of Murphy’s condition. If events no longer ground differences, then their continuation becomes arbitrary. This thought is both coherent and impossible. Coherent because it follows from Murphy’s lived structure, impossible because the very act of entertaining it presupposes a subject still embedded in time. 

Chapter Seven completes the work begun in Chapter Six. The asylum showed Murphy a world where grounding had cleanly terminated for others. Chapter Seven shows him inhabiting a world where grounding has been eroded for himself without being replaced. But the result is not peace but suspension. Murphy has not entered the dark zone. He has lost the light without acquiring the dark. 

This is why the chapter feels preparatory rather than climactic. Nothing decisive happens, yet everything has shifted. Beckett has now removed the last functional supports that allowed Murphy to imagine a stable position for himself. From this point on, the novel does not need to introduce new pressures or ideas. The structure is already sufficient. What follows will not be development but resolution in the sense of the elimination of an unstable configuration.

Next: Murphy 8

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