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Samuel Beckett, whose centenary is celebrated April 13, pictured his project before he understood it: that exhausted journey toward an impossible goal replicated in miniature by so many of his characters. It happens in Murphy (1938), his first published novel, which can be found, along with the rest of his official oeuvre, in the four-volume Grove Centenary Edition. Murphy, a youngish layabout with a yen for oblivion, finally finds a job that suits him, as much as anything could be said to suit him. (That immediate downward qualification is the Beckett tic afflicting everyone who ingests his work at an impressionable age.) He signs on as a nurse in a mental institution.