Are Beckett and depression synonymous?

After finishing the Molloy in the trilogy of stories, and beginning on Malone Dies, I’ve definitely noticed a shift. I laughed out loud in Molloy, underlined ferociously, marked my favorite passages, and overall enjoyed my reading experience. Starting on Malone Dies (I’m only about 25 pages into it), I was expecting more or less of the same thing. But what I’ve experienced so far has been grim, much more subdued, and just flat out depressing. Certainly the writing style mirrors that of the first story, and there continue to be amusing moments, but I find myself more inclined to chuckle at them rather than produce a full laugh.

I don’t know if I am just getting used to Beckett’s style, or more fully understanding the “lying” that he’s doing, but Malone Dies seems a little more transparent. The story Malone is relating is readily broken from, and his musings seem to carry us out of and into “reality”—whatever reality or world or surface that may entail.

“What tedium. And I call that playing. I wonder if I am not yet talking again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject? I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which may be noble is mere poltroonery. Already I forgot what I have said. That is not how to play.” Pg. 189

All I can say is that it is bleak. Reading this I’m finally recognizing why this is considered his dark trilogy. It is kind of bothering me. And not because I don’t understand it—Oh, how I wish that was a luxury I could afford—but because I’m experiencing the emptying out, the kenosis. Beckett is draining me. He’s making me question “why?” and “what’s the point?” and I don’t want to answer those questions, because I’m scared if I do I’ll end up as a blob of impotence in bed, wheeling around a cart full of soup and excrement with a giant, hooky stick.

On a lighter note, I was poking around the Beckett reference site and found this link to a piece done by The Onion, mocking Beckett as a modernist and minimalist, and it cheered me up a bit: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47722