Samuel Beckett was a member of an isolated - and privileged - Protestant middle class in the Irish Republic, which came into existence in his fifteenth year. While sharing in the generally contemptuous attitude of his class towards the popular and aggressively Catholic democracy of the country, he was also strongly influenced (like everyone else) by the cultural effects of the Irish literary revival.

Consequently, Murphy reflects a profoundly ambiguous attitude towards the Irish characters whom populate it, albeit the action takes place chiefly in London. When we are told that it is ‘always a pleasant’ to leave Ireland in Murphy, we are listening in to a somewhat self-ironising confession of his own feelings. As one critic has said, for Beckett, Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s was something to reaction against. But it was also the source of a profound sense of social and communal alienation which marks all his writings.

Beckett spent much of the period 1928-1939 travelling between Dublin, Paris and London (with side journeys to Germany), engaging in modernist literary activities connected with the circle of James Joyce. In London he attended the Tavistock clinic where he received treatment for neurosis and heard Carl Jung lecture on the case of a girl whom, he said, ‘had never been fully born’. This impressed him as a description of his own condition, and the title-character in Murphy, written in this period also, undoubtedly maps out the insecurities he felt in many ways.

The other characters of the novel enact, in various ways, different forms of derangement combined with different bohemian strategies and stances, all of which betoken the resources and resourcelessness of the socially maladjusted. Perhaps, however, the women in Murphy offend the author by being so very well adjusted: they seem impervious to everything that the author and his characters can throw at them.

Beckett was highy active sexually though occasionally anxious about his potency (virility) and had affairs with numerous cultured woman but also with a number of prostitutes. Throughout his life he frequented prostitutes and presumably found in them a relationship well-adapted to his own preference of sexual intercourse isolated from social undertakings.

His novels are full of unfeeling and brutal exchanges of this sort and Murphy is, in one aspect, an extraordinary anthology of misogynistic jokes and wilfully scabrous sexual episodes. Are they intended seriously? Or are the simply a way of confronting and - as it were - owning up to dishonourable and inhumane feelings as regards the psycho-sexual nexus? Or, finally, are they a measure of the disaffected condition of the upper-middle class Irishman of Protestant stock in the post-independence period?

Beckett was, in the ordinary sense, an agnostic and an atheist and the simplest reading of his texts is that they affirm and express the sense of disappointment experienced by those for whom God is not there - a deus absconditus. Waiting for Godot, for many readers, has this primary meaning and there is no doubt that Beckett intended his title to suggest it. At the same time he insisted that it does not have a meaning in any such a positive sense and that it means whatever the audience make it mean. In the same way Murphy is about the condition of absurdity (“Thou surd!”) which is met with when the conventional reasons for existence are removed by religious scepticism. In this it is of course entirely modern and entirely un-Irish by the standards of the time.

Arguably the blasphemous (and remorselessly indecent) language of the novel represents an angered reaction to a world in which ethics and belief are found to be groundless. At the same time, the novel engages with a serious of belief-systems including the post-mortal survival of the ‘soul’ (about which there is much talk), the truth of horoscopes, and the reality of the ideal zone occupied by ‘mind’ as opposed to ‘body’. In this sense it is a mordant reflection on the tyranny of certain religious and philosophical ideas composed from within rather than a satire upon them from without.

Beckett plays in particular with the idea of a mind-body division which he derived from curious reading in the works of a “Belgo-French” philosopher Geulincxz who coined the Latin phrase that Murphy repeats, Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil veles (where nothing is of value nothing is desired). In the novel all such mock-erudition has a comic value. At the same time, the mind-body divide, first stated in the modern form by Descartes, is a real philosophical problem and one that has cause a good deal of intellectual discomfort over the generations.

Bishop Berkeley of Trinity College Dublin - Beckett’s university - founded the Idealist Philosophy according to which the world without (i.e., outside) is a projection of our minds, and further that our minds are all projections of the mind of God which sustains the ‘objective’ world by thinking about it all the time. One wag at Trinity wrote a Limerick - ‘If God is in the quad ...’ - and it was traditional for intellectuals at that university to have a view of Berkeley’s theory.

Beckett is no exception, and he is careful to assert in the sixth section (or chapter) of the novel that Murphy’s nonsense-theory of the mind-body split does not involve him in ‘the idealist tar’. This is, incidentally, an allusion to Bishop Berkeley’s experiments with “tar-water”. Be that as it may, Murphy believes that the world outside his mind is only meaningful in so far as it appears inside his mind, and foolish enough to want to escape into the calm of his mind where the troublesome things of the world - including women - cannot reach him.

This is the project of a solipsist [i.e., someone who is locked into thinking about himself] - in this case a ‘seedy solipsist’ - and the tension between such an alienated and misguided idea and the instinctual demands of his body makes for the plot of the novel, such as it is. Along with that, there is of course the quest of Miss Counihan and her admirers for Murphy on the premise that while she is hoping to fulfil her passion for Murphy, she may slake her occasional desire with Neary and Wylie, as indeed she does. In so doing she lives up to the suggestion that her ‘quantum of wantum cannot vary.’

The treatment of sexuality and emotional relations clearly marks it as a young man’s novel. There is a great deal of cynical humour in the treatment of the way in which the illimitably promiscuous characters are each attached to another than the one with whom they are currently sleeping (it is implied that they make each other ‘happy’ in just that special sense). The description of the men is often funny and malicious, and the description of Murphy’s clothing is particularily so, but the physical account of virtually all the women in the novel is expressly offensive.

From the biographical record it is apparent that the author was enduring something of a psycho-sexual crisis. At the time of writing Murphy, Beckett was clearly a frequenter of prostitutes (his stabbing in Paris almost certainly arose from such an encounter) and was also fitfully involved in affairs with literary women. His earlier love-affair with Peggy Sinclair has left marks on the novel, notably on the illiterate letter written by Murphy’s prostitute friend Celia - whose name, indeed, recalls the notorious obscenity of Swift’s poem ending, ‘Celia, Celia, Celia s**ts.’

A recurrent butt of the satirical humour of the novel is the Irish literary world and, more generally, the panoply of cultural pretentions surrounding the new ‘Gaelic’ Irish State. Austin Clarke, a literary-revival poet, is cruelly caricatured as Ticklepenny, the Irish ‘pot-poet’, an alcoholic of doubtful sanity. In an essay for the Bookman journal written in 1934, Beckett had castigated Irish poets for their ‘flight from self-awareness’, arguing that a new convention had been established which occluded the actual:

Such remarks, though unkind, are unquestionably made in the spirit of earnest criticism: the literature of Ireland after the revival was infused with a profound spiritual complacency based on the idea that Irish people - and especially Irish peasants - were more spiritual than others, or that Ireland had preserved more of the spirituality of the ancient world through its Gaelic origins.

Indeed, the repudiation of Irish ideals can be seen as the central motive of the novel. Neary’s attempt to brain himself agains the buttocks of Cuchulain in the GPO and Murphy’s determination that his ashes should be flushed down the lavatory in the Abbey theatre (as well as the disappointment of this scheme) are part of an overarching satirical intention unquestionably designed to trouble the complacency of the Irish establishment.

Yet, by these means, the author also succeeds in demonstrating how radically devoid of a social and national community he - like his central character - really are. Suicide is the only conceivable solution to such a predicament and it is not accidental that Murphy, in his attempts to isolate himself from the world according to the rocking-chair method that constitutes the chief mechanical invention of the novel, compasses his own destruction (ironically by means of ‘chaos’).

The novel Murphy thus stands as a monument to Beckett’s sense of personal alienation before he learned how to turn his theme into a more universal and more moving witness to the essential condition of alienation which is common to all intellectually alert individuals in the modern world, and with it the essential loneliness of the universal human journey from birth to the grave.

Whether Samuel Beckett finally discovered in this journey any transcendent idea or emotion is for each reader to judge. His own confession was that he had ‘nothing to express’ and ‘nothing with which to express it’ and - for this reader - that spells an almost unique degree of nihilism in the literature of modern times.