The Unnamable

What is the setting in the book, The Unnamable?

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The narrator's location is not indicated directly. He describes himself in a vast, dark place, where time does not appear to elapse. All he sees are “dim intermittent lights [that] suggest a kind of distance,” (287) and occasional glimpses of Malone, or maybe Molloy, but without any legs. Though having no idea what the parameters of the place are, he assumes he is "fixed and in the centre" (289). Even though he mentions another location, the jar he lived in in front of the restaurant in an unnamed town, we eventually find out that it may have actually been Mahood that lived this way, not the narrator. Considering the existentialist nature of the novel, it is more useful to think of the narrator as a voice emitting into a metaphysical abyss, without coordinates or dimensions.

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