Voice, narrative, and identity were always vexed matters for Samuel Beckett. Beckett depicts the absurd and at times surreal in Murphy, a novel that Herbert Read calls "a perfect example of surrealist humour". Both the humour and the pathos that pervade Beckett's early works derive in large part from discontinuity and non sequitur, the numerous surreal attempts by characters and narrators to find or impose meaning or significance. Beckett's Surrealist refusal to ascribe meaning to his work and to his narratives may have been easier to sustain once he shifted to first-person, dramatized narrators. Beckettean recounting is ultimately antithetical to both Surrealist automatic writing and impersonality and to Joyce's aloof autobiographical fictionalizing in which, as Stephen puts it in Portrait. In the third book of the Trilogy, the obsessive, disembodied, and immobile Unnamable, who may be asleep and dreaming, already dead, or in limbo, offers its most fragmented and incoherent monologue.