This chapter offers an analysis of three novellas, The Expelled, The Calmative, and The End, written in 1945–6, immediately before the first trilogy of major novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). Beckett published these novellas with Texts for Nothing in 1955 as Stories and Texts for Nothing. It is clear that despite a four- or five-year gap between composition (Texts for Nothing was written in 1950), Beckett sees a link between the novellas and the texts that immediately follow the great decomposition of the human subject in The Unnamable. My argument here is that the novellas, in their thematisation of a radical state of homelessness, begin to analyse the precondition for the entry into the posthuman condition that is fully embraced in Texts for Nothing. Indeed, at first glance these texts would seem to be almost perfect allegories of the condition of the human subject that Heidegger defines in Being and Time. Striving to articulate what it means initially to find oneself in the world, Heidegger deploys the term Geworfenheit, or thrownness, to define that sense of being in the world without guidance, support, or, indeed, meaning. Finding itself in the world, as such, the subject is forced, in that purely existential moment, to find its own path, its own trajectory towards significance. And it is here, in this condition of thrownness, that each protagonist of the novellas finds himself. The Expelled begins with the protagonist literally thrown out of his refuge into the street; the protagonist of The Calmative is always already expelled into what he calls, critically, the ‘nightmare thingness’ (CSP 69) of the world; The End traces the trajectory of the protagonist from a charity institution to a basement, a sea cave, a cabin, and finally to a shed: his is an increasingly desperate discovery that being in the world means never finding refuge; his is the discovery, in other words, of being nowhere: ‘Strictly speaking I wasn't there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere’ (CSP 94).