In the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett's fiction took a dramatic turn, away from stories featuring the compulsion to (and so solace in) motion, towards stories of stillness or some barely perceptible movement, at times just the breathing of a body or the trembling of a hand. These ‘closed space’ stories often entailed little more than the perception of a figure in various postures. The journey theme had been a feature of Beckett's fiction from Murphy and Watt, and it culminated in the body of French fiction: the four French Stories of 1946, the three collected novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, the fictive fragments, written to reach beyond the impasse of The Unnamable, collected as Texts for Nothing, and the great post-Unnamable novel, How It Is. Motion had offered Beckett's ‘Omnidolent’ creatures a degree of solace, something of a respite from assailing voices: ‘As long as I kept walking I didn't hear [the cries] because of the footsteps’ (CSP 45), the narrator of First Love reminds us. But it was the fact of movement rather than any particular destination that consoled, as the narrator of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ makes clear: ‘I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way’ (CSP 156). The shift from journeys, a movement from and return to some shelter or haven, often ‘home’, to the ‘closed space’ tales is announced in the fragments and Faux Départs that eventually develop into All Strange Away (1963–4) and its sibling Imagination Dead Imagine (1965): ‘Out the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no not that again.’ The more imaginative alternative was now: ‘A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there’ (CDW 272). The change necessitated a new character as well, the nameless ‘him’ who became Beckett's second major fictional innovation.