Ontological Homelessness: Beckett’s Vice-Existers and the Postmodern Subject in The Unnamable

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953) has long pressed its readers toward a choice between two accounts of the self it stages. For the humanist reading, Mahood and Worm, the novel’s so-called “vice-existers,” are failed surrogates for an authentic self that has lost its home; for the deconstructive reading, they attest to the dissolution of subjectivity as such. Ontological homelessness names a third possibility. Drawing together Heidegger’s analysis of Unheimlichkeit and the fundamental attunements of anxiety and profound boredom, Georg Lukács’s account of transcendental homelessness, and Prashan Ranasinghe’s distinction between ontic and ontological homelessness, the essay argues that Mahood and Worm are neither surrogates nor symptoms but positions within a topology of failed selfhood that is itself the only “subjectivity” the novel can offer. The Unnamable is not a self that has lost its home, nor a non-self that never had one. It is a structure of homeless persistence, a mode of being that survives only through the figures it must shed, that says “I” without crediting the pronoun, that can neither cease nor continue. Close reading of three movements, the inventory of the vice-existers and their repudiation, the Worm sequence, and the closing aporia, isolates a category of postmodern subjectivity distinct from displacement (Said), hybridity (Bhabha), and abjection (Kristeva): the homeless subject, which has lost not the place where it dwells but the metaphysical conditions under which dwelling could be intelligible. The reading carries consequences for Beckett studies, for postmodern theories of the subject, and for the still-unsettled relation between the trilogy and Ireland’s post-independence condition.