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“Maddy Rooney remembers ‘one of those new mind doctors’ lecturing on a little girl patient: ‘The trouble with her was she had never been really born!’ (All That Fall, Faber and Faber, 36-7); and Malone feels he is ‘far already from the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go.’ ‘Yes,’ he affirms, ‘an old foetus, that’s what I am now, hoar and impotent, mother is done for, I’ve rotted her, she’ll drop me with the help of gangrene, perhaps papa is at the party too, I’ll land head-foremost mewling in the charnel-house, not that I’ll mewl, not worth it.’ ‘The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence’ (Trilogy, Calder Publications 190, 226, 285). The phrase ‘never been properly born’ is buried in the ‘Addenda’ of Watt (Calder and Boyars, 248); and the idea is surely present in the climactic image of Godot: ‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth’ (Waiting for Godot, Faber and Faber, 90).” Footfalls anticipates the key ritual that five years later will possess the old woman of Ill Seen Ill Said: the "long pacing to and fro in the gloom" (Ill Seen Ill Said, Faber and Faber, p 47).
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