ABSTRACT
At May 1951 Bataille's own reputation as essayist, critic and novelist was already established, but all he knew of Beckett's work was Murphy, Molloy, and the titles of the two subsequent novels of the trilogy. Anonymity leads Bataille to see in Molloy both the inhumanity already described and a silence he associates initially with the 'essence of being'. Certain terms from existential humanism are prominent in Bataille's vocabulary; and his description of Molloy as a figure 'composed of the inevitable beauty of rags', seemingly the quintessential vagabond, tends to romanticize him. The literature as inevitably as death compelled by the imperative necessity characteristic of every road that leads to a summit and that no longer allows any room for choice leads to the fathomless misery of 'Molloy'. For Bataille, Beckett's achievement in this text is to have taken the inheritance of humanist language and shown its emptiness for literature, ruined site of the haunting anonymity of being.
