Through Beckett's Texts for Nothing, the wavering ontological status of the narrator progressively motions towards greater and greater sparseness, ultimately stripping down to the pure murmuring trace of the narration itself. Even when finally pared down to the trace of a silent voice separated from speaker, the recognition of futility and subsequent abandonment or contradiction that marks every motion within the texts persists: “It's not true, yes, it's true and it's not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything.” The immediate failure that plagues {{better word?}} every attempted motion, becoming apparent in the same instant as notion of possibility, thus maintaining an unstable stasis, then is the only dependable certainty within the text. Freud's theories regarding trauma and mourning are readily applicable to this self-contradictory state, as Jonathan Boulter has shown: “Trauma … fundamentally disrupts the linearity of experience, disrupts the narrative progression of a life by what Freud calls Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action.” (Boulter, 336) Trauma is the causal reaction formed to a particularly dramatic event of loss but due to the impact of the event becomes itself a cause, haunting the present with memories of the traumatic event; thus the derailment of linear time: the past is brought into the present, albeit unwanted. Mourning is the ego's therapeutic reaction to trauma – the attempt to overcome the loss, to prove its own persistence despite the loss of the thing. If trauma can be defined as the past's unwilled conflation with the present, mourning as a reaction to trauma cannot be the extrication of the the past's continual recurrence but the means by which the ego (if successful) learns to accept the presence of loss. Texts for Nothing were first published in French in 1955, Beckett's first work after his trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. The chronology notwithstanding, an understanding of the Texts as a continuation or response to the trilogy is aided by the apparent continuity (though as Boulter points out, this word is problematic) of the last line of The Unnameable, “you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on,” and the first line of Texts for Nothing, “Suddenly, no at last, long last, I couldn't any more,” as well as Beckett's own words that the Texts were “the grisly afterbirth of L'innomable.” (Boulter 333) Boulter defines the task of the trilogy as “the attempt to write the end of Being.” (337) The Texts, as the body following the supposed end prove the failure of Beckett's project in the trilogy; thus, Boulter reads the Texts as the mourning following “the loss of the ability to cease.” (338) Thus the Texts outside of the content function paradoxically as the proof of failure by their simple existence, as well as the therapeutic means to work through the loss (i.e. prior to form and content, the Texts are a work of mourning). However, within the texts of the Texts, there is a mourning that perhaps cannot be entirely separated from the “meta-mourning” of the being of the text itself, but that can aid an understanding of the contradiction and futility of the narrator as a traumatic mourning of the loss of the past. The mourning of a lost past is in itself contradictory. In Freud's understanding, mourning is the reaction to the traumatizing event by which the mourner attempts to “work through” the trauma, by returning to the original event. Freud describes the dream of subjects of traumatic neuroses as characterized by “repeatedly bringing the patient back to into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.” (Boulter 335) Thus the task of mourning is recognize the memories as originating from the scene of trauma which may have been repressed; in other words, to accept the reality of loss by way of an acknowledgment of the source of the ghosts that haunt the present. Boulter suggests that mourning is “a reaction and a process, 'slow and gradual,' by which loss is overcome.” (336) It seems more accurate however, that mourning not be the overcoming of loss but rather the integration of loss. It is apparent that a state of trauma brought on not by the loss of a loved one, ideal, or place but by loss of the past, greatly complicates the process of mourning. As the state is ontologically unstable, the voice of the narrator in the Texts is almost reliantly self-contradictory. Nevertheless, text 8 seems to indicate the loss of a past (and by acknowledgment of loss, indicate the presence of mourning?): I begin to have no very clear recollection of how things were before … Yes, my past has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind me, or I burrowed my way out alone, to linger a moment free in a dream of days and nights, dreaming of me moving, season after season, towards the last, like the living, till suddenly I was here, all memory gone. (132) In ordinary trauma victims it is the past that haunts the present as the source of the traumatic event that may be unknown, yet if the subject of loss is the past itself, the past is vanished along with possibility of communication with the present. The loss of a spatial object (e.g. loved one) establishes a communication between past and present via the recurrence of the trauma in the present consciousness of the traumatized subject while the loss of the temporal concept of the past negates the relationship between past and present even as a ghostly communication. Thus the narrator of the Texts is trapped in a kind of temporal limbo: “And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in Paradise, and the mind slow, slow, nearly stopped.” (106) From this limbo there is a groping for memories, an attempt to reclaim temporal linearity, but despite the narrator's efforts the futility is recognized as soon as the memory is proposed. Text one's lingering over the story of “Joe Breem, or Breen” seems to be nearly successful: “that's all I remember this evening, it ended happily, it began unhappily and it ended happily, every evening … Yes, I was my father and I was my son.” (103) However, this memory fails to create a linearity as the constituents of the memory are conflated and the memory itself cannot be isolated to a specific time; thus several lines later it becomes apparent that the “every evening” of the story is the present evening of the narrator's isolation in the present: “That's how I've held out till now. And this evening again it seems to be working, I'm in my arms, I'm holding myself in my arms…” (104) Text two represents the lost past as light and again proposes a memory as a means to reinstate the past; however, the futility of the attempt is much more explicitly acknowledged by the narrator in this second effort than the first. “Back in that kind of light. See the cliffs again … See Mother Calvet again …” (105) And after the effort: “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show, it would have gone out, nothing terrible, nothing showed, of the true affair, it would have snuffed out.” (106) As this differing optimism in the narrator's reaction towards the possibility of reclaiming the lost object via memory in texts one and two reveal, through the texts there is a definite progression of stripping-down or negation as the process of mourning is run through. {{better phrasing?}} The physical body is present at the beginning of the first text, although already struggling: “I say to the body, Up with you now, and I can feel it struggling, like an old hack foundered in the street, struggling no more, struggling again, till it gives up. I say to the head, Leave it alone, stay quiet, it stops breathing, then pants on worse than ever.” (100) By the end of the second text, “the legs seem to be still working.” (108) By the end of the third, “There is no flesh anywhere, nor any way to die.” (113) This abandoning of the corporeal body can be read as the necessary realization in the narrator that the state of being without a past, trapped in unchanging time is the state the dead exist in, or can be read as the narrator's attempt at mourning – the dead exist in the past so to identify with the dead would be to return to site of loss. However, in the case of the loss of the past, the site of loss is also the object of loss. Thus the task of mourning is complicated and perhaps impossible as the time period which must be revisited in acknowledgment of the reality of loss is precisely that which has been lost. The analogue in ordinary mourning would be to return the lost loved one to life. The alternative, though outside of the ordinary scope of mourning, is to join the dead. Already in text two, the standpoint from which the narrator attempts to recall memories is that of the dead: “Above is the light, the element, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways …” (105) These memories, which if successful at forming a link with the past would restore life to the narrator as the restoration of linear temporal progression, thus the inhabitants of this conjured time and space are ironically imagined as the living, while the narrator, unable to progress from or to the present, is the dead. The inability to escape from the “one eternal second,” creates an identification with the dead in the narrator at the same time he realizes the impossibility of action, even of death. Text three seems to explicitly state the futility of return to the scene of loss: “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never lead led anywhere, the memory of it has gone out too, a great flame and then blackness, a great spasm and then no more weight or traversable space.” (111) Recognizing his inability to reform linearity via a revisiting of the traumatic event, the narrator turns to fantasy as a means for the same purpose yet nevertheless finds himself untransported: “I'm here, that's all I know … Here, nothing will happen here.”