A Piece of Monologue (1979) by Samuel Beckett (Summary)

 

A Piece of Monologue (1979)

 by Samuel Beckett

(Summary) 

A Piece of Monologue — Summary

An old man stands alone in a dim, bare room. He does not sit. He does not move much. The space around him feels emptied of time, as though the world has already withdrawn and left him behind. What remains is memory—flickering, unreliable, and heavy.

He begins to speak, not to anyone present, but to himself, as if words are the only proof that he still exists.

His thoughts circle around birth, light, and death. He recalls the moment he was born—not as joy, but as an intrusion into darkness. Light arrives like a wound, sudden and painful. From the beginning, existence feels less like a gift and more like an unavoidable condition.

The man’s memories do not unfold in a neat order. Instead, they appear in fragments—brief images, repeated phrases, broken reflections. He remembers rooms he once lived in, each one reduced to the same essentials: walls, corners, light fading at the end of the day. The rooms blur together, as though all of life happened in a single enclosed space.

He speaks of his parents, especially his mother. Her presence is distant, almost ghostlike. Birth connects him to her, but love does not clearly follow. What remains strongest is the physical fact of being born, not the emotional bond. Even memory cannot soften it.

The man returns again and again to the image of light and darkness. Daylight fades. Night comes. Lamps are lit, then extinguished. The cycle repeats endlessly, mirroring the passage of life itself. Each lighting of the lamp feels like a small defiance against extinction, though the man knows it will not last.

As he continues, death presses closer—not as a dramatic event, but as a certainty that has always been present. He speaks of others who have died, though they are unnamed and barely described. They exist only as absences. Death, like life, leaves no clear meaning behind it.

Language itself begins to falter. The man repeats words, hesitates, corrects himself, as though speech is breaking down under the weight of what it tries to hold. Memory fails. Certainty dissolves. What remains is the act of speaking—mechanical, compulsive, necessary.

He reflects on the passage of time, but time has lost its measurements. Days and years collapse into a single awareness of having endured. Life becomes something that happened, rather than something still happening.

Near the end, the man returns once more to the beginning—to birth, to the first light. The circle closes. What started in darkness ends in darkness. There is no revelation, no resolution, only continuation until speech itself can no longer go on.

The man stands still, suspended between memory and silence. The room remains. The light fades.

And the monologue ends—not because something has been concluded, but because nothing more can be said.