Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett first written in French and published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951.

[1] Beckett wrote all three books in French and then, aside from some collaborative work on Molloy with Patrick Bowles, served entirely as his own English-language translator; he did the same for most of his plays.

[1] As the books progress, the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down,[4] and as Benjamin Kunkel notes, they "[have] become famous in the history of fiction because of what is left out: the usual novelistic apparatus of plot, scenes, and characters.

In this room he writes and every Sunday a man visits to pick up what he has written and bring back what he had taken last week "marked with signs" that Molloy never cares to read.

A vicious mob starts forming, but then Molloy is rescued by the dog's owner who forgives him and takes him into her home.

Part Two is narrated by a private detective by the name of Jacques Moran, who is assigned the task of tracking down Molloy and carrying out specific instructions.

They wander across the countryside, increasingly bogged down by the weather, decreasing supplies of food and Moran's suddenly failing body.

Later, Moran is confronted by another man, who he murders in a sudden violent outburst reminiscent of Molloy and hides his body in the forest.

He limps and drags himself through the countryside through the fall and winter at an excruciatingly slow pace and poses bizarre questions to himself about biblical topics and matters of the church.

Feeling that preferred strategy of violence is too risky, Moran makes up a story about doing a pilgrimage and requests a tea to send the farmer away so that he can escape.

When Moran finally arrives home, several months later, he laments the death of his bees and hens, which were left out all winter.

[5][6][7][8] Novelist Tim Parks, writing in The Telegraph, described its influence on him: "Molloy entirely changed my sense of what could be done with literature.

You have a wonderfully engaging, comic voice remembering distant events in the narrator's life – an attempt to find his mother to ask her for money – yet as you read, every ordinary assumption one has about novels is stripped away from you, the setting, the identity of the characters, the time scheme, the reality of events themselves.

"[9] Comparing Molloy with the novels that preceded it, The New York Times wrote that the experience was "to marvel anew at the velocity and drive of the prose.

"[10] In an interview, Brian Evenson said: "I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy".

[12][13] Passages from the novel are spoken by a possessed character in Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland and based on the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.

The production of Molloy has been praised for its accessibility: "The distinct readings lend the book a dramatic presence, playfully yet skillfully rendering all the characters to illuminate Beckett's irony.

So while in print it seems dark, even absurd, in audio this work takes on the full richness of comedy, probably as Beckett, preeminently a dramatist, intended.