Murphy
WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Collected Poems in English and French
The Collected Shorter Plays
(All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,… but the clouds …, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)
The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989
(Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1-13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1-8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment
Endgame and Act Without Words
Ends and Odds
First Love and Other Shorts
Happy Days
How It Is
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
Krapp’s Last Tape
(All That Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)
Mercier and Camier Molloy
More Pricks Than Kicks
(Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)
Murphy
Nohow On
(Company, 111 Seen 111 Said, Worstward Ho)
The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett
Rockaby and Other Short Plays
(Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, All Strange Away, and A Piece of Monologue)
The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett (boxed paperback set)
Volume I: Novels
(Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)
Volume II: Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
How It Is)
Volume III: Dramatic Works
Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism
Stories and Texts for Nothing
(The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1-13)
Three Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition
Watt
Murphy
Samuel Beckett
Copyright © 1938 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett
First published in English in 1938 by Routledge, London.
The first Grove Press edition was published in 1957.
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Design, composition, and textual supervision by Laura Lindgren
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-6939
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9836-5
Grove Press
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DISTRIBUTED BY PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST
Murphy
1
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.
He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin again for the billionth time. Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local movements were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the thongs. The breath was not perceptible. The eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice moulding, shrinking and fading. Somewhere a cuckoo-clock, having struck between twenty and thirty, became the echo of a street-cry, which now entering the mew gave Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo! directly.
These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped. He wondered dimly what was breaking up his sunlight,
