written and published in french in 1951 and in samuel becketts english translation in 1956 malone dies is the second of his immediate postwar novels written during what beckett later referred to as the siege in the roommalone writes malone is what i am called now on his deathbed whittling away the time with stories and revisions of stories the octogenarian malones account of his condition is contradictory and intermittent shifting with the vagaries of the passing days without mellowness without elegiacs wittier jauntier and capable of darker rages than his precursor molloy malone promises silence but as a storyteller he delivers irresistibly more