A man lies in his mother's bed, writing, though he cannot recall how he arrived there. Another man, Moran, receives orders to find him. Samuel Beckett's 1951 novel, written first in French as an act of deliberate self-estrangement, dissolves the architecture of narrative into something primal and ferocious. The two monologues mirror and consume each other: one a vagrant's spiralling confession, the other a bourgeois detective story collapsing under its own weight. Every sentence is an act of erosion, stripping away certainty until what remains is the bare, comic, agonizing fact of consciousness trying to account for itself. Here begins the trilogy that remade the novel into an instrument of radical honesty about what it means to go on.