"[1] Like Molloy, Malone Dies furthers Beckett’s project to "empty the novel of its usual recognizable objects—plot, situation, characters—and yet to keep the reader interested and moved.

"[1] In fact, Malone’s habit of beginning but then interrupting or abandoning his stories not only demonstrates the faulty fiction-making capacity of the mind, but reveals "its impotence as an instrument towards fulfillment.

"[3] Confined to bed, Malone's predicament reflects the Trilogy’s progressive restriction of locomotor freedom and the shift from an outer to an inner search,[3] not only for meaning, but for "a final letting go, a dying which is more than the cessation of breathing.

Soon after, Malone admits to having killed six men, but seems to think it's not a big deal, particularly the last: a total stranger whom he cut across the neck with a razor.

At the end of the novel, Lemuel is assigned to take his group of five inmates on a trip to a nearby island on the charitable dime of a Lady Pedal.

Lemuel takes his group onto the terrace where they are greeted by a waggonette driven by a coachman and Lady Pedal, along with two colossi in sailor suits named Ernest and Maurice.

Thoughts of riding down the stairs in his bed, philosophical observations, and conjectures constitute large blocks of text and are written as tangential to the story that Malone is set on telling.

Several times he refers to a list of previous Beckett protagonists: Murphy, Mercier and Camier, Molloy, and Moran.