When the faculties of perception are impaired,

In Beckett’s novella The Calmative, in which the images of the boy and goat that the narrator meets become confused to the point where “soon they were no more than a single blur which if I hadn’t known I might have taken for a centaur” (1995, 67; Maude 2013). 
The contexts for this “confusion” in Beckett’s work, encountered here as “blurring”, but elsewhere as aural “buzzing”, usually also encompass generalized problems with attributing salience to what is seen or heard, as well as with social interaction and affect—all also symptoms found together in those with schizophrenia.
Perceptual difficulties arise consistently in Beckett’s work and are not just a feature of a weakness of the physical organs of sensory perception but symptomatic of some general loss of understanding of, or investment in, the organization of the world,, where the faculties of perception are also impaired, something directly implicated in the loss of distinction between world and self. For Malone, the “same old noises” have “merged into a single noise, so that all I heard was one vast continuous buzzing