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The basic story here is simple enough. Following the death of his father, the only member of his family who seems to have had any feelings for him, a man is evicted from the family home. He ends up moving in with a prostitute whereupon he immediately makes himself comfortable in his own Spartan way, emptying his room of all but a sofa on which he lies facing the wall doing nothing. For some reason the woman puts up with this but, when she falls pregnant, insisting that the child is his, he leaves literally while she is in the throes of childbirth, the sound of which haunts him for years.

All the man wants is to be left alone. Because he exists in the real world his aloneness has to be relative and he does show himself willing to make some small compromises if only moving his feet so the prostitute, Lulu, can sit on a bench with him. The theme of the book hinges on the role of the father, the man's relationship with his own father and the prospect of becoming a father himself. He is ill-equipped to function in a relationship, the notion of them exists in his head but he has no practical use for them. Nor love it seems of any kind which he "understands" through books. He is willing to take and to allow things to be taken from him (e.g. the sex with woman is at her instigation) but enjoys little of a physical nature although wandering through graveyards does entertain him; he talks at length about them.

The little book is full of word play (e.g. Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards�) and Beckett's dark humour and, in many respects, is his quintessential work albeit not his greatest. It is the perfect introduction to his world. It is easy to see Molloy, and Murphy in particular, in the unnamed protagonist but many of the themes he develops in later works are touched upon here.

Like many of his works Beckett has made the text "vague" by removing personal details but it is the first of the works written between 1946 and 1950 that can be grouped under the general heading "the siege in the room", an expression Beckett coined to explain the shift in focus his writing took paring things down to the essential, the minimal, the unadorned, a world where the man in the story would feel completely at home.