The Expelled (L’Expulsé, written 1946, published 1955) by Samuel Beckett (Summary)

 

The Expelled (L’Expulsé, written 1946, published 1955)

by Samuel Beckett

(Summary) 

Summary

The story opens with a man waking in a strange, bleak place. He doesn’t know how he got there, but the first thing he notices is the emptiness around him—walls that are bare, a floor that echoes with every step, and a silence that presses down like a weight. He feels a dislocation, as though he has been removed from some other life, some other reality, though he can’t remember what that life was. He is the expelled one—the one cast out, abandoned, and adrift.

He tries to make sense of his surroundings. There is little to guide him: no furniture, no warmth, no sign of other human presence. Occasionally, he hears distant noises, but they are meaningless, as if coming from a world he can no longer access. He attempts to move, to find something familiar, but every action seems futile. Even walking seems to take him nowhere; the space resists him. Beckett’s prose renders his isolation in fragments, thoughts looping back on themselves, images flickering briefly before fading.

As he wanders, he begins to confront memories—shadowy recollections of family, of childhood, of people he once knew. These memories are unreliable, fragmented, sometimes contradictory. He recalls a figure, perhaps a parent, perhaps a sibling, but their presence is spectral, more felt than real. He tries to reconstruct his past, trying to anchor himself in identity, but the act itself is painful. Every memory reminds him of what he has lost, of the life from which he has been expelled.

Loneliness becomes almost a physical weight. He talks to himself, though the speech is often circular. He debates with invisible interlocutors, sometimes addressing God, sometimes no one at all. In this dialogue, he questions his existence, the purpose of his suffering, and the nature of the world that has cast him out. Beckett gives voice to this inner torment through dense, precise language, reflecting the rhythm of thought rather than conventional storytelling.

Occasionally, the expelled man experiences flashes of physical sensation—a cold floor beneath his hands, a fleeting taste of food, the echo of a footstep—but these moments are brief, unsatisfying, and often lead only to further despair. He searches for connection, for meaning, but the world offers none. In this void, time itself becomes distorted. He cannot measure it; days and nights blur together. He is suspended in a liminal state, neither living fully nor truly dead, merely existing in the residue of existence.

As the narrative progresses, he grapples with the impossibility of returning to the life he lost. Hope and memory collide, giving rise to moments of bitter clarity. He realizes that the “expulsion” is not merely physical—it is existential. He has been cast out of understanding itself, condemned to witness the world from a distance, unable to participate in it. In this awareness, his suffering is both immense and inescapable.

Toward the end, the man’s attempts at comprehension falter. Words fail him; logic fails him; memory falters. He is left with the raw immediacy of being expelled—alone, abandoned, and painfully conscious. Beckett does not provide closure or resolution. Instead, the novel ends in the same suspended, liminal space in which it began: a solitary consciousness in a desolate, indifferent world. The expelled man remains, a figure of human alienation, seeking meaning where none exists, his very existence a testament to the bleak, relentless absurdity of life.

In essence, The Expelled is a story of radical isolation and existential exile, presented in Beckett’s signature sparse, fragmented style. It is less a plot-driven novel than a journey into consciousness itself—an unflinching look at what it means to be expelled from home, from memory, and from meaning.