Roger's Reviews > How It Is

** spoiler alert ** Beckett is misunderstood. His books are not vague existentialist glosses on the immutable human condition. They are journeys. HOW IT IS might be the greatest novel I have ever read. I say this because the tears sprang out uncontrollably on the third-to-last page. I am thirty-eight years old and no book has had this effect on me in at least fifteen years. HOW IT IS is the story of a psychoanalysis. It is the story of a man discovering that he has a voice. It is a metaphorical account of Beckett's escape from schizophrenia. In Part One the voice is confused and confusing because the narrator is maximally dissociated. Through persistence and permutation the voice that speaks to him (this is not clear yet) forces the situation to change in an example of Hegelian self-determination. Pim emeges in Part Two as a necessary response to the breakdown of Part One's autistic solution. On to Part Two. By torturing Pim, the narrator learns what a voice is. He has never heard one before and does not possess one of his own. Part Two ends when the narrator and Pim switch places. Now he is the one being tortured by Bom. The book is organized like a mathematical proof. The narrator is attempting every solution, in series, in an attempt to discover what a voice is, where it is located, to whom it belongs. The voice moves around: outside him, inside Pim but caused by him, inside him but caused by Bom. Once he realizes that Bem and Bom are the same, his reasoning takes off. We see, in real time, the miracle of intelligence and psychic integration. Part Three is exhilarating as the narrator no longer crawls but begins to think. His reasoning accelerates as he comes closer to the truth. He picks up and abandons a series of partial solutions, each more comprehensive than the last. Finally, at the very end, he realizes the truth. The voice is his. It has always been his. He is dying. I still get goosebumps when I think of the cascade of YESES and screams that accompany the narrator's final accession to the truth. No other book I know (except maybe one of Beckett's other books) renders so movingly the will and desire to live than HOW IT IS.