'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now'. On his deathbed, and wiling
away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition i
s 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 w
as the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills,
where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them. I
t came down to me where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the
limit of earshot, soon weary. The dogs of the valley replied with their gross ba
y all fangs and jaws and foam.
