How It Is by Samuel Beckett
Published 1961 · 148 pages · 36,622 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is How It Is to read?
How It Is scores 86 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Beckett strips the language to its most elemental components: mud, dark, sack, tin opener, nails, hands, face. The vocabulary is spare almost to the point of pre-linguistic, but the total absence of punctuation and capitalization forces the reader to work hard to parse even simple words. The difficulty is formal rather than lexical — a different register of challenge from Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, but equally demanding.
- Sentence structure: 96 out of 100
- How It Is contains no punctuation and no capitalization throughout its entire length. Fragments arrive in waves — 'how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it' — and the reader must supply every syntactic boundary. This surpasses Absalom, Absalom! and approaches the unpunctuated monologue at the end of Ulysses, except here that technique applies to an entire novel.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- The physical scenario — a narrator crawling through mud in darkness, dragging a sack — is concrete, but it operates wholly as a figure for consciousness, suffering, and existence. The narrator's meditations on memory, voice, identity, and whether any of this occurred circle into pure metaphysics. Waiting for Godot (scored 85) is slightly more grounded by theatrical convention; How It Is abandons even that scaffold.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- The surface appears sparse, but recurring phrases return with slight variation — 'I say it as I hear it,' 'quaqua,' 'in the dark the mud' — encoding philosophical content in compressed repetition. Each fragment carries more weight than its word count suggests. The density is not encyclopedic like Ulysses (90) but closer to Austerlitz (50), tilted toward the high end by the amount of interpretive work each phrase demands.
- Narrative indirection: 93 out of 100
- The narrator's situation, identity, and reliability are permanently unresolved. He reports hearing a voice, which may be his own; the events with Pim may be memory, fantasy, or hallucination. The text ends by questioning whether anything it described occurred. This exceeds The Unnamable (90) in spatial and temporal ambiguity, approaching Finnegans Wake territory without the linguistic pyrotechnics.
- Symbolic density: 88 out of 100
- The mud, the dark, the sack, the tin of sardines, the journey, the encounter with Pim — every concrete element operates as symbol without the text ever announcing it. The crawling body is existence; Pim is the other person as object of torment; the sack is the minimal resource of life. Beckett refuses to decode any of it, leaving the symbolic architecture visible but unexplained.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Beckett's characteristic mode — pedantic precision applied to conditions of total abjection — generates sustained irony. The narrator accounts for his situation with bureaucratic scrupulousness ('before Pim with Pim after Pim') while crawling through dark mud. The gap between the formal register and the situation it describes is the engine of the prose. Less satiric than The Sellout (85) but more pervasive than Moby-Dick (45).
- Resolution withholding: 97 out of 100
- The text ends by retracting itself: the narrator suggests the entire account may be a fiction generated by a voice from elsewhere, and that nothing he described occurred as described. The three-part structure (before Pim / with Pim / after Pim) appears to promise architecture but delivers only circularity. Only Finnegans Wake (99), which literally ends mid-sentence to begin the novel again, withholds more.
- Structural complexity: 92 out of 100
- The three-part division is the novel's only visible skeleton; within each part, fragments arrive without paragraph breaks, punctuation, or any conventional organizing principle. Time is non-linear; the narrator may be multiple voices speaking through one channel. The architecture seems simple from outside and dissolves on contact, comparable to Ulysses (98) in the gap between apparent and actual structure.
How How It Is is regarded
How It Is holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.