Malone Dies

Malone, writes Malone, is what I am called now. On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malones account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of wilder rages than Molloy.The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived,