Beckett kept his third novel, Mercier and Camier, on the shelf for twenty-five years before reluctantly allowing its French publication in 1970.The book was apparently more valuable to him as an exploration of expressive forms than as a work of art in its own right. Indeed, the novel is clearly a kind of pivotal exercise, for here we can see Beckett on the one hand stressing the type of futile dialogue he was to perfect a few years later in Waiting for Godot (the French edition was published in 1952), while on the other hand further developing the system of narrative mirrors so useful in Murphy and Watt for expressing the experience of Nothing.

We do not have to read very far into Mercier and Camier to discover that the story as much concerns the narrator as the two eponymous heroes. With the first sentence the narrator thrice intrudes the first person pronoun, founding his own subjectivity on the adventures of the two characters: “The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time.”