The true riddle of The Unnamable lies in the narrator, an incredibly complex and yet overwhelmingly simple incarnation of language, who constantly speaks of having “no language” of his own, a concept that seems, before careful examination, impossible and self-defeating (325). The idea of language without a language appears ludicrous, and even more so when the narrator asks himself, “is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice…. But I have no reasons either, no reason,” (347). However, by shedding the flawed and false “Mahood” definition of language as self-created, the reader can understand the reality that the “hood” previously had hidden. Language is in fact created by man so that he can interact with and conceptualize the physical world, hence the statement that “if Mahood were silent, Worm [the world] would be silent too” (338). The narrator calls himself “the tympanum” that both divides and connects two differing worlds, “on the one hand the mind, on the other, the world, [not belonging] to either,” and says of the communication between those worlds “it’s not to me they’re talking, it’s not of me they’re talking” (383). What remains unsaid is that it is through him they’re talking; language is being used to connect the two worlds, but at the same time acts as “the partition” (383).

The narrator “seek[s his] lesson,” the lesson of language, “to the self-accompaniment of a tongue that is not [his],” because it takes a physical being to examine language, self-examination (306). His speech, “what [he speaks] of, what [he speaks] with,” comes entirely from Mahood and his ilk: those who attempt to give language meaning by force (324). The idealistic concepts represented by Mahood simply “[ram] a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed” in an attempt to create a universal system of naming that binds objects to their brands, or names (324). The problem of language, in The Unnamable is finally approached through language itself, not by an intermediary as is the case in Beckett’s preceding works. Language says of the characters previously used to represent him, “all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone” (303). He then wonders “if [he is] clothed,” going on to say “I have often asked myself this question, then suddenly started talking about Malone’s hat, or Molloy’s greatcoat, or Murphy’s suit” (305). Here the identity (clothing) of language is discussed, reflecting on the fact that, in the past, intermediaries were used to define that identity. Even if language somehow obtains an individual identity (is clothed), it is “but lightly,” because only man can attribute meaning to names; the ideal of self-identified language simply does not exist in The Trilogy (305).

This Mahood problem of naming, so pervasive in The Trilogy, appears also in Endgame, particularly in the character Clov, an intellectual figure, who “loves order” (57). Clov dreams of “a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust,” and, like Mahood before him, idealizes this kind of controlled order (57). With the same arrogant intellectualism of the Mahood method of thought, Clov thinks he can describe “the general effect” of the outside world in “just a moment,” asking if Hamm wishes him to describe “merely the whole thing” (73). The difference between Clov and Mahood, though, is that Clov wishes to fall, bringing intellectualism to the world, saying “when I fall, I’ll weep for happiness,” whereas the intellectualism of Mahood tries to force the world to rise to its preconceived hierarchical categories (81). The problem of naming, in this later work, has accepted and moved beyond the inability to force correspondence on the world by lifting Worm up to Mahood. Instead a new problem arises, that of bringing intellectualism down to the world. When Mahood falls he can understand Worm, and when Mahood understands Worm, he can name him.