Metaphors Of Human Condition In The Drama Of Samuel Beckett

INTRODUCTION

The problem of seeing in an indeterminate world has long preoccupied Samuel Beckett. In his works, human beings no longer occupy a stable and privileged point in space and time from which they may visually organize, give meaning to, and institute relationships with other beings and objects. Instead, they find themselves drifting in and out of vague, undefined fields of vision in which the objects of their gaze appear, disintegrate, combine, separate, approach, and fade away in unpredictable fashion. The subjects themselves are victims of the same instability, and they call their own existence and its form into question at least as often as they interrogate the world around them. Indeed, the very boundary between the self and the world is an object of much confusion and speculation. In a 1934 essay entitled " Recent Irish Poetry," Beckett distinguished between the "antiquarians" and those who "evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object," which he equates with "the breakdown of the subject," asserting that "it comes to the same thing—rupture of the lines of communication." He claims that "the artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects…. He may even record his findings, if he is a man of great personal courage."

By his own admission, Beckett is not a philosopher; his ideas may be (and have been) traced to numerous sources from Democritus of Abdera through Saint Augustine, Descartes, Geulincx, Pascal, Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Sartre. He is rather an artist— a writer sensitive to the specificity of his time and capable of translating it into literary and dramatic forms that affect his audience by their ring of truth and by their ability to translate for a collectivity what each of us has felt or suspected vaguely, intuitively, disturbingly. Beckett has defined the mission of the modern artist in the following terms: "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

Beckett(1906– ) has confessed his special concern with human impotence. His early discipleship of Joyce left him, artistically, with a vast overshadowing literary achievement against which he must assert himself. He had to break away from the Joycean abundance and the Joycean omniscience, and he sought out the extreme limits of economy, ignorance and inhibition. From the packed world of Ulysses he turned to create the bare world of “Waiting for Godot” (1954). Beckett takes away man’s property, family, place in society, function in society, and then begins to strip him of the normal human equipment (legs and mobility, for instance). At the same time his characters go through the motions of reasoning and planning and use the vocabulary of experiencing the emotions of failure and success. It is not just that Estragon and Vladimir, the two tramps in “Waiting for Godot”, have no home and no locale; but they seem unaware that they have no home and locale. They do not expect the normally expectable.

Just as their continuing bewilderment and uncertainty is punctuated by moments of comic confidence, so, in the case of Pozzo, the pantomimic representative of power and possessions, continuing confidence and assurance are punctuated by moments in which the sense of precariousness intrudes. The servitude of his roped, human beast of burden, Lucky, is grotesquely unreal and idiotic, yet the idiocy is the basis of Pozzo’s ‘security’. Moreover Pozzo’s assurance is related to a vocabulary that presupposes a civilization and a placing in it: such a vocabulary is irrelevant in the ‘world’ which the idiom of the tramps has established and into which Pozzo intrudes.

Man’s identity, his limitations and his place in the universe are at issue in Beckett’s plays. In “Happy Days” (1961) we find a woman, Winnie, buried waist-deep in sand against a background that suggests the aftermath of an atomic holocaust. Her companion, Willie, is barely visible behind the mound. The conversation of the two (it is mostly monologue by Winnie) is outrageously out of keeping with their situation. Our familiar postures and verbal habits, the standard poses of human wisdom and consolation, are subjected to a ruthless scrutiny in being adopted by the half-buried woman.

The counters of contemporary discourse—pretentious and unpretentious—are employed in a situation of impotence and near total negation in which they bear the weight of sheer tragedy and comedy at the same time. “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958) and “Endgame” (1958) continue the same preoccupations, the latter with Nagg and Nell in dustbins and their blind son chair-bound. Against paralysis and powerlessness of this kind Beckett brilliantly deploys a dialogue that is at once tragically and farcically at loggerheads with the immediate. It moves to tears and laughter, yet compassion persists through nightmares of negation and absurdity.

Increasingly Beckett makes use of serial irony. In “Watt” (1953) ironical postures or devices are used tellingly, then ironically over-stretched so that irony is undercut by a new layer of irony, and there is no resting-place for conviction or steady response. But the humour is irresistible. What arises, with devastating imbecile logic, out of the need to feed Mr Knott and regularly get rid of the remains in his bowl, is one of the funniest things in our literature. As a novelist, of course, Beckett seems rather a lone figure, though his contemporary and fellow-Irishman Flann O’Brien (properly Brian O’Nolan) (1911–66) published a highly experimental novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), whose characters are provoked to compete with their creator in the authorial game.

CHAPTER I

Samuel Beckett’s novels

I.1 Beckett’s early novels and poems

It is arguable that by far the most significant “foreign” novelty to be performed in

London in the years immediately after the second war was Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”. The play opened to largely dismayed reviews at the small Arts Theatre in

August 1955, but reports of the sensation it had caused in Paris two years earlier, coupled with a real enough and discriminating curiosity, allowed it to transfer for a longer run at the Criterion Theatre a month later.

The success of “Waiting for Godot” in London cannot simply be put down to a yearning for innovation on the part of a theatre-going intelligentsia; the play also contained distinct echoes of a truly ‘alternative’, but often despised, British theatrical tradition, that of music-hall comedy. In Beckett’s hands, however, that tradition had been transformed by a sparse, but none the less definite, musicality and by a dialogue rich in literary resonance. Beckett (1906-89), born near Dublin, educated (like Wilde before him) at Portora Royal School and at Trinity College, and since 1937 permanently resident in Paris, cannot be slickly or imperially fitted into a narrowly ‘English’ tradition of English writing and English theatre. He was an English speaking, Protestant Irishman, and, as the full range of his work demonstrates, his highly literate, cricket-playing, Bible-reading, Irish background had a profound bearing on what and how he wrote. Having worked closely with James Joyce and his international circle in Paris in the late 1920s, Beckett also remained part of a polyglot and polyphonic world of literary innovation.

His earliest publications (which, apart from his work as a translator and a novelist, include an essay on Joyce and a study of Proust) also testify to his espousal of a Modernism which transcended frontiers and what were often presumed to be the impassible barriers between languages. Beckett continued to work in both English and French, with French often taking precedence over his native tongue. His work, however, ceased to be tied to a monoglot environment once it had undergone the scrupulous linguistic metamorphosis which mark his own acts of translation (his puns, for example, are often exclusively and inspiredly English).

Although his trilogy of novels, “Molloy” and “Malone Meurt” (1951) and “L’Innommable” (1953), had established Beckett as amongst the most discussed and respected of the avant-garde Parisian writers of the early 1950s, it was Godot (also originally written in French) that gave him a wide international reputation. That reputation was cemented by his later work for the theatre, notably the plays known by their English titles as “Endgame” (1957), “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1960), and “Happy Days” (1962). He also wrote innovatively for the radio (All that Fall of 1957, Embers of 1959, “Words and Music” of 1962, and “Cascando” of 1963) and for BBC television (“Eh, Joe” of1965 and “Ghost Trio” of 1977). His one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex ‘script’ designed as a tribute to Buster Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying ‘sssh’.

I.2 Beckett’s “most wanted” novels

“Murphy”, Beckett's first full-length novel, published in 1938 with the help of Herbert Read, is a natural development from “More Pricks Than Kicks”. It is more accessible than the later novels but its apparent lightness of texture should not be mistaken for a lack of substance. Although Beckett himself has tended to dismiss the early English novels as of lesser importance than his works in French, as one critic has observed Murphy “is that rarity in modern fiction, a completely successful novel of ideas”.

Murphy is a young man not in the best of health. He suffers from heart attacks and like Belacqua has pains in his neck and feet. He never wears a hat and dresses in an unkempt suit that through long wear is shaped like a tube and stained the colour of verdigris. He is a defunct scholar (of theology), and has recently come to London as the intended of a Miss Counihan. Described as a “seedy solipsist”, he is supposedly set on amassing a comfortable fortune and setting up a home where she will join him. But Murphy is not disposed to an active life; apart from an interest in astrology and chess he is content to live in idolence on the pittance which he fraudulently extracts from his rich uncle in Holland. However, his indolence is not purposeless. Murphy bases his life on the belief that his mind is “a large hollow sphere hermetically closed to the universe”

Our first glimpse of him is in this chair, sitting out of the sun. Murphy's experience in the rocking-chair is perhaps the closest any of Beckett's characters ever come to happiness. The release achieved in a trance-like abandonment to the chair's motion is so great that Murphy has created what he calls his “Belacqua fantasy”, in anticipation of which the rocking-chair is only a dubious substitute.

All Beckett's novels revolve around the central character. Although the eventful progression of the story is often farcically displayed, the posturing of Neary and his friends would be nothing without the reflective quality of Murphy's mind. This “mind” is the centre of the novel, and it is necessary to understand the various considerations with which it is beset before one passes on to the more traditional aspects of the story.

“ENDGAME”

The problem of seeing in an indeterminate world has long preoccupied Samuel Beckett. In his works, human beings no longer occupy a stable and privileged point in space and time from which they may visually organize, give meaning to, and institute relationships with other beings and objects. Instead, they find themselves drifting in and out of vague, undefined fields of vision in which the objects of their gaze appear, disintegrate, combine, separate, approach, and fade away in unpredictable fashion. The subjects themselves are victims of the same instability, andwithout the reflective quality of Murphy's mind. This “mind” is the centre of the novel, and it is necessary to understand the various considerations with which it is beset before one passes on to the more traditional aspects of the story.

“ENDGAME”

The problem of seeing in an indeterminate world has long preoccupied Samuel Beckett. In his works, human beings no longer occupy a stable and privileged point in space and time from which they may visually organize, give meaning to, and institute relationships with other beings and objects. Instead, they find themselves drifting in and out of vague, undefined fields of vision in which the objects of their gaze appear, disintegrate, combine, separate, approach, and fade away in unpredictable fashion. The subjects themselves are victims of the same instability, and they call their own existence and its form into question at least as often as they interrogate the world around them. Indeed, the very boundary between the self and the world is an object of much confusion and speculation. In a 1934 essay entitled " Recent Irish Poetry," Beckett distinguished between the "antiquarians" and those who "evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object," which he equates with "the breakdown of the subject," asserting that "it comes to the same thing—rupture of the lines of communication."

Charles Lyons sees in “Endgame” an ironic reversal of another biblical account, that of the creation of the world. In his provocative essay, " Beckett's Endgame: An Anti-Myth of Creation", he presents a fascinating and coherent reading of the play as a depiction of the disintegration of the universe as perceived by a dying consciousness. While God created the world by separating the earth from the waters and by creating light, Beckett shows us a universe where the earth and waters, as perceived by Clov from the two windows of the set, come to resemble each other more and more, as they are reduced to "grey" and "zero," and where people like Mother Pegg die for lack of light.

The cessation of the consciousness, the end of existence, immobility and silence—all are merely impossible dreams for Hamm.The only solution to the endless game of perception in which he feels trapped is equally impossible: "Breath held and then … " (p.70). Hamm seems to be speaking here of suicide by apnoea, which Beckett described in the following manner in “Murphy”: "Suicide by apnoea has often been tried, notably by the condemned to death. In vain. It is a physiological impossibility" (p.185). Earlier in the same novel, birth is defined as "the moment of … being strangled into a state of respiration" (p.71). Thus, existence, which is characterized by breathing and which is savagely forced upon our unwilling bodies at the beginning, is equally implacable at the end: our breath will not stop, no matter how much we might will it to do so, and the end so longed for by Hamm continues to elude him. Hamm sums up his reflections on the problem of not being able to end either his story or his life with a poignant reference to one of Zeno's paradoxes: "Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of … that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life" (p.70). These words echo Clov's from the beginning of the play: "Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap" (p.1). The moments of existence, which can never add up to make a life because they are endless and in constant motion, are like the pile of millet grains which Zeno proposed splitting in half, then in half again, and again, and again, ad infinitum, in a process that could come to an end only in a time and space unknown to, and unperceivable by, the human consciousness. It is characteristic of Beckett's fine sense of irony that he chose a paradox created by a philosopher whose goal was to prove the impossibility of movement in order to illustrate his own conception of the impossibility of immobility.

Describing time in terms of grains "pattering down" into a heap also brings to mind a common image of time: that of an hourglass filled with grains of sand. Although the flow of sand in an hourglass does come to an end, the process can be renewed continuously by turning over the glass to set the grains in motion again.

I.3 Beckett on stage

By now there is a large body of criticism of Beckett's theater, some of it of a very high order: Jacques Guicharnaud's, Hugh Kenner's, Ruby Cohn's, among writings in English. But like that of the fiction, this criticism often suffers from a scanting of the works' aesthetic reality, their mysterious functioning as drama, in favor of their being seen as closed philosophical utterances, histrionic forms of the vision Beckett had previously shaped into intense, arid tales, structures of intellectual despair placed on stage. Or else, if they are accepted as proper dramas, they are made local, particularized into anecdotes or fables of circumscribed and idiosyncratic conditions.

Thus an observer as acute and wrongheaded as Norman Mailer could detect the motif of impotence in Waiting for Godot but interpret it as sexual, delivering the play over to his own anxious concerns and so brutally shrinking its dimensions. In the same way an astute critic like the Yugoslavian scholar Darko Suvin can call Beckett's entire theater "relevant" only in "random and closed situations of human existence: in war, camps, prisons, sickness, old age, grim helplessness." Yet if these plays are not "relevant" to everything, coherent with human situations everywhere, then they are merely peripheral games of the imagination, grim and transient jests. But they are nothing of the kind.

When En attendant Godot opened in Paris in the spring of 1953, it was received with widespread incomprehension and even revulsion on the part of the general public and the conventional press, and with great praise, amounting in places to a kind of ecstatic gratefulness, by a number of influential persons who were able to assure it a modest commercial success.

Waiting for Godot was a commercial failure in the United States in 1956. Its critical reception was very much like that in France: bewilderment and distaste among the middle-brow reviewers, intense enthusiasm in avant-garde circles. Marya Mannes wrote a representative notice: "I doubt whether I have seen a worse play. I mention it only as typical of the self-delusion of which certain intellectuals are capable, embracing obscurity, pretense, ugliness and negation as protective coloring for their own confusions." Norman Mailer wrote two reviews for the newly founded Village Voice. The first was a scornful attack, the second, a week later, a grudging admission that the play had something after all. He added, however, that he still believed that "most of the present admirers of Godot are … snobs, intellectual snobs of undue ambition and impotent imagination, the worst sort of literary type, invariably more interested in being part of some intellectual elite than in the creative act itself."

This peculiar emphasis on what was considered to be the effeteness and self-deception of both Beckett and his admirers was characteristic at the time, and was only gradually moved to the fringes of cultural history as a die-hard position of know-nothingism when the years passed and Beckett's genius and his enormous influence on younger writers became evident to nearly everyone. The phenomenon of course resembles the various stages of reaction to Joyce and more broadly to modern art and literature in all their successive movements. In this case an idea of dramatic procedure was being violated; the theater, which was supposed to be an emotional matter, to present images of action, was being employed for inaction, and its tradition of completions and endings was being flouted by an almost intolerable irresolution. These things more than the play's ostensible "content," its melancholy view of human power and possibility, were what so disturbed conventional minds.

If “Waiting for Godot” is now widely accepted as the greatest dramatic achievement of the last generation, some would say the greatest imaginative work of any kind during the period, it is obviously because its once radically new form has with time been assimilated into educated consciousness, becoming at last a kind of norm itself. Diderot once wrote that "if one kind of art exists, it is difficult to have another kind," and Alain Robbe-Grillet has described the difficulty more precisely: "A new form always seems to be more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to consecrated forms."

The new forms or dramatic methods that Beckett and others introduced in the early fifties found their own consecration in the collective designation Theater of the Absurd; along with Eugène Ionesco, whose work his in fact scarcely resembles, Beckett continues to be identified as one of that artificially created "movement's" chief practitioners. Dissimilar as their plays are, Beckett and Ionesco did however share a common ground in the abandonment of sequential action, their exclusion of almost everything that could be thought of as plot, and their creation of a general atmosphere of illogic, of not "adding up." If anything, Ionesco's first plays satisfied more strictly than did Beckett's the dictionary definition of absurdity as being "that which is contrary to reason"; Beckett's dramas have always been closer to Camus's meaning in his description of the absurd as "that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints."

This separation between desire and reality is in the largest sense what Waiting for Godot is about; it is a play of absence, a drama whose binding element is what does not take place. The fierce paradox of this provoked the search for the identity of the Godot of the title, as a way of uncovering the play's meaning, that became a minor critical industry in France and elsewhere.

It has become clear that whatever the origin of the name, Godot is not to be sought outside the boundaries of the play itself, just as he is not to be encountered within them. What the two tramps do encounter is his possibility; they are held to their places, their stripped, rudimentary existence on "a country road" with its single tree, at evening, by the possibility that he will come to them or summon them to him, and their task, we might call it their raison d'être, is just to wait. The play was originally called simply Waiting, and there is a significant clue in the final French title: "en" attendant, "while" waiting. The drama is about what Vladimir and Estragon do while waiting for Godot, who does not come, whose very nature is that he doesn't come. He is a sought-for transcendency, that which is desired beyond our physical lives, so that these may have meaning.

But the meaning, the validation the tramps seek for their lives is never forthcoming; there is no transcendent being or realm from which human justification proceeds, or rather—and this is the crucial difference between Waiting for Godot and so many modern works of despair—we cannot be sure whether there is or not. In the space this doubt creates, Didi and Gogo exist, neither "saved" nor "damned," unable to leave, which is to say, unable not to exist, held there by an unbearable tension which it is their task—or rather the play's task; the play as formal human invention—to make bearable. Godot is not a figure for God or for immortality or, conversely, for the absence of these; he or it is a term within an imagined structure of life as we would feel or experience it if we were reduced, as Didi and Gogo are, to sheer, naked, noncontingent being, without theories, rationalizations, or abstract consolations of any kind.

For as Jacques Guicharnaud has said, the figure of the tramp represents "man as such, as detached from society," and so from the mental and behavioral constructions by which social organization hides from us our real condition. Society is by nature optimistic, progressive (in the sense that it moves forward, develops new forms, believes that it improves), and self-sufficient. Man beyond (or beneath) society is pitched past such categories as optimism and pessimism, is existentially static (except that he moves physically toward death), and is radically insufficient. Waiting for Godot is a drama of man in such a state.

Pozzo and Lucky. These two are emissaries from the realm of time and from the life of society, with its institutionalized relationships, its comforts and delusions, above all its thirst for hierarchies. Didi and Gogo live in an atmosphere in which time barely moves forward and in which all values are flattened out under the arc of Godot's possibility, the value whose absence empties all judgments. Here one thing is as important or as unimportant as any other—a carrot or a memory, a shoe or love—and here nothing has power over anything else. In Pozzo and Lucky, on the contrary, are embodied the very principles of human power and exploitation, delusory, ultimately disastrous, but maintained by them as the foundation of their lives.

I.4 Transitional objects and the isolate: “Malone Dies”

When Freud was seventy-two, he wrote in a letter to Ernest Jones that youth and age are “the greatest opposites of which human life is capable”. He went on to add that an understanding between the two is impossible, which is true for most of us and which perhaps helps explain why so few literary critics have turned their attention to Beckett’s portraits of old age. What is blatantly manifest in Beckett’s work sems to have been repressed – or, if repressed is not quite the right word, not sufficiently recognized as being of interest to the psychic economy of the young and the middle-aged.

Thus some critics thematize death in Beckett’s work, distributing it evemly over the course of the life span, and others concentrate on formal concerns. One can take a different tack, focusing not on death as a metaphor for existential dread or for the absent author, for example, but rather on the literal situation represented in “Malone Dies” – the final and solitary days of an old man who tells himself stories to help forget his increasing pain. The purpose is not so much interpretation on a literary text or interrogation of a theory of human development as it is to see what may be yielded from the cross-fertilization of Beckett’s rich fictional monologue with the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s theories of the transitional object and the isolate. It is interesting in what these two very different modes of discourse may suggest about dying in old age. It could be added that “Malone Dies” could be considered the middle term of Beckett’s trilogy, in isolation from “Molloy”, and “The Unnamable”.

From the opening pages of the alternately grim and hilarious monologue that constitutes “Malone Dies”, to the novel’s conclusion, which is the death of Malone, it is clear that Malone perceives this period of his life to be radically different from the others. Installed in a small room of a large house whose character is mysteriously indeterminate, Malone is confined to a bed near the room’s only window. He is long past “sweet and seventy”, as Beckett puts it, thereby in a single phrase calling into question what most of his readers will consider the chronological definition of old age – that is, sixty, or sixty-five. Indeed, Malone is so old that he cannot even remember how old he in fact is (apparently he is about one hundred). It is a commonplace to think of old age as a short span of life preceding death, but Malone defines old age as a vast expanse of time that is followed by a short period of strange “decomposition”, which is the period of the present tense of the novel.

To characterize this new stage of life, Beckett uses a literary metaphor of the epilogue as well as the imagery of the prenatal period. Malone is presented to us naked and toothless, happily sucking on a pillow from time to time. Acutely self-conscious of the resemblance between these two extremes of life, Malone wryly observes that the only other time he was not mobile was when he was an infant. “What matters”, he asserts, “is to eat and excrete”. And in charting his decaying physical condition, he sentimentally, and ironically, invokes his childhood: “My breath, when it comes back, fills the room with its din, though my chest moves no more than a sleeping child’s. I open my eyes and gaze unblinkingly and long at the night sky”. So a tiny tot I gaped, first at the novelties, then at the antiquities”. “Antiquities” refers of course to old people. Like a child, he will discover – although he already knows this full well – that one cannot live only in the condition of play.

It is of course not unusual to refer to the old age of decrepitude and senility as a second childhood. But Beckett’s analogy is unexpected – in great part because Beckett pursues it in such a sustained way and in great part because Malone is not a pitiful character. Malone faces pain and death with black-humored tenacity and an inventive, analytic, nutty intelligence that refuses to relinquish its own activity.

If Freudian psychoanalysis presents us with the primal scene of desired but forbidden sexual relationships – the celebrated triangle of father, mother, and child – and Lacanian analysis presents us the imaginary mirrored scene of the perceived self, on “Malone Dies” we have staged a different dramatic scene, the terminal scene of the isolate (one), which bears an inverse relation to Winnicott’s scene of the intermediate area of infancy with its transitional object. The new period of life, this time of strange decomposition, may represent a new genetic period subsequent to that of the imaginary and the symbolic, as Lacan has defined them. As “Malone Dies” suggests to us, our final genetic moment is not the entry into death. Rather it is the entry into the unsettling stretch of time preceding death in which one’s relation to desire, that fundamental category of Lacanian psychoanalysis, may be radically altered.

For Lacan, all desire issues from an originary lack, one that is structural in nature. This lack one strives continually to fill. But as we see in Beckett’s speculative fiction, perhaps there comes a time in our lives when such desire is not decisive and we do not even lament the loss of desire itself – or at the very last, desire plays a minimal role. A man’s body – a woman’s body – changes, and Malone refers to his body as if he had a mind of its own in this new period of his life: “My body does not yet make up its mind”.

Interestingly, Beckett’s fictional scene of an old, dying man suggests a reversal of this process at the end of life: meaning is withdrawn from a number of objects and located, finally, in one only – the last possession. This is Malone’s exercise book, which contains an intermittent chronicle of his suffering, reminiscences, and the stories of he composes, fictions that yield a measure of illusion and control. The process is one of subtraction and contraction. Malone and his exercise book together delimit a new field of intermediate experience. The exercise book is the place of both the me and the not me. And as Malone is increasingly alienated from his disintegrating body – his body seems to his to be swelling and growing heavier, his head is “on gire, full of boiling oil” – the “I” comes to exit in the book itself. This is the illusion that sustains him. Without the words to write, he does not exist. As he writes, paradoxically, bemoaning a temporary lack of imaginative power, “ I am lost. Not a word”.

In “Malone Dies” a dying man not only accepts the substitution of different figures for himself – the bizarre stories Malone writes of Sapo and Macmann are partial figures of his past selves – but he also creates them, locating the “I” in the verbal world of both the mind and the book. It is a kind of magical extrusion of the “I”. the indeterminate state of being at the end of life mirrors the intermediate area of experience of infancy: the subjective and objective, the inner and outer merge each into the other. If toward the end of his life, the end of the novel, Malone, having experienced excruciating pain, reflects hat all was going “well. I had forgotten myself, lost myself”, he also immediately calls his rhetoric into question. “Things were not going too badly. I was elsewhere. Another was suffering.”

As Malone moves closer to death, all once-treasured objects simply lose their meaning rather than increase in meaning, as it often though occurs in the psychic life of old people. Beckett is calling into question the whole notion of recapturing the past. Malone, who thought he knew his objects by heart, is surprised to find that he doesn’t even remember what indeed is in his small pole of objects. Many of the objects he thought were in his possession are in fact missing, and unfamiliar objects – things of which he has no memory whatsoever – are present.

“Only those things are mine”, Malone writes, “the whereabouts of which I know well enough to be able to lay hold of them, if necessary, that is the definition I have adopted”. This answer may be of consequence for understanding the experience of the infirm and immobile elderly, whose lives are characterized by a contracted physical space. For Malone, the necessary condition of possession of physical contiguity, that is, control and manipulability. When Malone dropped his hooked stick, he means by which he has manipulated the world at a distance, it is one of the catastrophic moments in the novel. Yet it is a catastrophe to which he reconciles himself almost with alacrity. It is as is physical necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Malone concludes that physical contiguity is a necessary condition for possession, but he also realizes that it is not a sufficient condition. His bare room is furnished with a bed and a wardrobe. it also contains two pots for his waste, which serve as the starting point for further meditation on the subject of possession:

“The pots do not seem to be mine, o simply have to use them. They answer to the definition of what is mine, but they are not mine. Perhaps it is the definition that is at fault. They have each twi handles or ears, projecting above the rim and facing each other, into which I insert my stick. In this way I move my pots about… They are not mine, but I sy my pots, as I say my bed, my window, as I say me” (p. 80)

“Malone Dies” hs much more in common with the fictional technique of stream of consciousness than with the split subject of postmodernism. And among all the voices of Malone that we hear, we occasionally hera the touching voice of a man who regrets his life .

Beckett was consistent in his use of drama as an extension of his wider interest in the gaps, the jumps, and the lurches which characterize the functioning and the malfunctioning of the human mind. In his plays — as much as in his novels — ideas, phrases, images, and minds overlap; voices both interrupt and inherit trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere and separate consciousnesses both impede and impress themselves on one another. Beckett’s dialogue, for which “Waiting for Godot” is particularly remarkable, is the most energetic, densely layered, and supple written by any twentieth-century playwright; his comedy, whether visual, verbal, ritual, or even, at times, slapstick is amongst the most subtle and surprising. The set of “Waiting for Godot” may, for example, require simply the suggestion f ‘a country road’ and ‘a tree’; Endgame may take place in a ‘bare interior’; and the o designer of “Happy Days” may be instructed to aim for a “maximum of simplicity and symmetry” in the representation of an’expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound’, but the static baldness of Beckett’s visual statements serves both to counterpoise and complement the animation of his verbal ones.

When Beckett uses blindness, as he does with Hamm in Endgame, he suggests that one kind of deprivation may alert audiences to the force of alternative ways of perceiving.

When, by contrast, he uses silence, as in Film and the mime play Act without Words II (1967), he seems to be directing his audiences to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. Beckett never plays with minimalism and reductionism simply for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve. In parallel to the work of certain Modernist architects and composers, if without their puritan frugality, he was exploring the radical potential of the idea that “less is more”.

CHAPTER II

Human condition in Samuel Beckett’s work

II.1 Metaphors regarding human condition

In the ambiguous relationship which he has with his characters it is Beckett who undertakes this role. Like his characters his life has been spent, with a remarkable purity and tenacity of purpose, creating what he regards as an arduous pensum. In the attempt to discover the fixed nature of the Self, the constant search within all his work, he has made use of these seemingly autonomous characters, Malone and the Unnamable, as they in their turn claim to have invented others, Macmann, Mahood or Worm, in the endeavour they share with him to escape from the prison of time and words into the timeless and changeless condition of Selfhood they believe was lost at birth. “Yes I have a pensum to discharge, before I can be free. I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps…” says the Unnamable. This task, as we shall see, Beckett considers both necessary and futile, an unending labour in which, he writes in the dialogues with Duthuit, “the obligation to express” earns him (the artist) the right “to fail, as no other dare fail”.

The moments of tenderness in Beckett’s works are rare. The pain and suffering which enter with him, however, are not caused by the social and moral dilemmas of the traditional novel. This man, as far as is possible, avoids all contact with the other human beings in his vicinity. He builds no city, erects no memorial for himself and above all propagates no dynasty. The earth will show little trace of his passing save perhaps the transient scar of a bicycle wheel or the faint impression of a crutch by which he manoeuvres when his body no longer permits him to negotiate the perils of his beloved machine. Within the well-ordered confines of Mansfield Park, Howards End or Washington Square he has no place. He is not concerned with either the well-being or the machinations of society, and he does not appear to be even a marginal participant in the pre‐ occupations that have absorbed fiction over the last three centuries. Nevertheless, if his appearance as a representative of homo sapiens would outrage the inhabitants of Washington Square, it will be seen later that the work of fiction as an artefact, as a phenomenon in a world of mentally seen phenomena, a bound book allegedly holding the mirror up to man in society, is most relevant to the way in which his fictional nature has evolved. Whereas this figure in person seems entirely unreconcilable to our conception of fiction when placed in the firmly rooted context of the bourgeois novel, it will emerge that in form and essence he is probably the last mould of the fictional character and the most fundamental, and that the book he inhabits is both the successor of, and commentary on, the whole library of apparently secure volumes that have gone before.

The hero regards himself as having been forcibly ejected into the world and usually speaks of his birth as an 'expulsion'. He remembers it as a time of agony though it is his own pain at leaving the womb which he recalls rather than the physical agony of the mother. In his birth pangs he discerns the harsh origins of the suffering with which he has since lived and they continue to remind him of that moment of deprivation when, to his knowledge, the Self which is truly his outside time and the world was lost and the search to recover it became a necessity. Without his own consent he was forced out into the grey indifference of day, “through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.” Birth is the first integer in an arbitrary series of cause and effect whose last point may or may not be death, and though, intellectually, he admits this, he spends much of his life hopelessly longing to return to the womb ('the only endurable, just endurable period, of my enormous history') , which is apparent in his habitual assumption of the fetal position ( Estragon, Belacqua and the Unnamable) and the pleasure he finds in living in a single small room—a garret or the padded cells of a lunatic asylum for preference.

Once he has been “expelled” or “whelped” the hero finds himself in a world where those around him are either hostile or a nuisance, and he tries to disregard their attitude even when they show their feelings in a physical manner. Estragon is beaten every night but does not seem surprised or troubled, while Malone describes how other people would not allow him to follow his own interests in solitude: “The grown-ups pursued me, the just caught me, beat me, hounded me, back into the game, the round, the jollity”. It is their determined attempt to get him back into the life from which he has, with a purpose, deliberately excluded himself that hurts him more than their blows. Similarly Murphy cannot understand, and seeks to escape, the persistent attentions of his acquaintances, and Belacqua prefers a low pub “where the porter was well up, first; and the solitary shawly like a cloud of latter rain in a waste of poets and publicans, second; and he neither knew nor was known, third”, for, in their search for identity, any interference from without reminds them where they are and sets them right back at the beginning. Moreover they have learnt the lesson of their birth and expect nothing but suffering from life; they were 'born grave as others syphilitic'. As with Sophocles, not to be born is the best for man though 'some people are lucky, born of a wet dream and dead before morning'. At one level of their existence Beckett's characters are filled with outrage and compassion for humanity, compelled as it is to exist in this arbitrary condition not of its own making, and subject only to decay. When the hero can forget his personal search for identity he speaks eloquently and movingly about the transience of life, but his compassion is for humanity in general: humanity as an individual is too often the interrupter of his meditation.

The actual existence of the hero in the world of his fellow men is only of secondary importance, however; it is the life in the mind which is his major concern. In the trilogy the hero has almost entirely left the world behind. All that remains of his life there are a few memories and certain reflections on the past which are written into the stories he occupies himself with telling. Instead of the erstwhile distractions of fiction—marriages, travels, crimes—we have the mind, the discursive intellect, an intelligence encased in layers of ignorance about its own nature, continually shifting about among its particles of knowledge. The words which the hero writes or utters—ultimately they are the same—mirror closely the working of our own minds intent upon discovering, in the useless complexity of possible detail within the skull, some certainty about our being-here, and repeatedly failing. We are witnessing the final incarnation of European rationalism; the Cartesian labour reduced from a debate on first causes to the notation of an old man dying in bed and meditating as he does so on how to distribute sixteen sucking stones in only four pockets and at the same time ensure that he does not suck the same one twice until all the rest have received the same treatment in strict rotation. If this man also dwells on the mysterious workings of Christian grace or the problematical interaction of mind and body there is, given the meaningless world that he conceives, little to choose between the respective preoccupations.

Time and the impossibility of an escape from time passing into the supposed infinity of the Self is one dimension of Beckett's art: the other is language. Words are the foundation of Beckett's self-confessed art of failure for they form the impenetrable barrier that prevents us from knowing who we are and what we are. Words, of course, are the materials of the stories which the characters tell themselves and it is here that the link with life in time is most ironically apparent. Through the stories the narrator creates a series of vice-existers (fictional characters who relive parts of the hero's life and through whom he can explore his obsession with guilt, suffering, time and language).

The Unnamable describes his condition as one where he himself, the walls, the floor, the whole intelligible world, are made of words tumbling over one another in an incoherent, unformed storm of particles through which his own voice must stubbornly persevere “…you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” This way to the Self, like the struggle with time, leads straight into an impasse.

Man therefore is left in the meaningless context of infinity: Pascal's intimations have become a reality. Here time and space, let alone man, his thinking and his actions, are rendered meaningless. Around us in time and space lies the incomprehensible void which science has succeeded in making more real for us but no less frightening. In this void the actions of man appear absurd and his substitutes for God— humanism, love or social purpose—are all alike the imaginings of men who have blinded themselves to reality.

Communication between individuals in Beckett is at best a vulgarity, and love, that dream of terrestrial transcendence, a patent folly. Only the love of Celia for Murphy or the inactive affection of Belacqua for the Alba in “More Pricks Than Kicks” resemble literature's customary treatment of the tender passion. The succeeding relationships between the sexes are all grotesque, painful, repellent and cruel. The love affair of Macmann and Moll in “Malone Dies”, for example, is more bitter and more disgusting than even Swift, in his most violent moments, cared to imagine.

The hatred which the hero feels is similar to the turning from the world in anger and disgust of the Old Testament prophets or the early Fathers of the Church, a renunciation which originates in the conviction that “whatsoever is not God is nothing”.If the heroes cannot communicate effectively they will do it in the most crude and painful way possible; if there is no God of grace and mercy they will not assume the responsibility for dispensing any of those qualities that have been rendered meaningless by His absence. This inversion of traditional attitudes is apparent in the relationship between Molloy and his mother. The hallowed mother figure is hated not less but more than any other creature. Molloy finds her as odious and pernicious as ever the King of Brobdingnag found the human race in general. He describes the way in which he always added the letter “g” to her name:

“I called her Mag, when I had to call her something.And I called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it better than any other letter would have done …”

She is hated not for herself but because she was a cause of his birth and hence all the consequent suffering. Other human beings may interfere with the course of the hero's life but their presence is negligible beside that of his mother. She reminds him of the terrible severance that placed him where he is and the thought of her recalls him to the contingency of his being here. Again, in Endgame, the three generations portrayed on the stage all attempt to make one another suffer as deeply as possible because each is filled with a nauseous sense of an opportunity missed, that had things been otherwise they might not have been born. “Why did you engender me,” Hamm shouts at Nagg, “Accursed progenitor.” The suffering within finds its only release in the infliction of pain. Thus Molloy's attitude to his mother reveals an additional dimension in the hero's distrust of love. Beckett's heroes not only believe love to be all too inadequate a substitute for the totality lost with God but are aware that love also leads to copulation and the birth of more suffering .Love therefore is the most revolting and sinful of all human activities. “Like dogs,” comments Malone, when he sees two people making love in a window across the way.

Birth, however, is not merely the result of “sin”, it is also the tragic act. Man's life is the working out 'of the original and eternal sin…the sin of having been born. In the trilogy the consciousness that in being born man has somehow committed a grave sin for which he must always live to expiate is built by the hero into a cosmology of guilt and suffering. He believes that if he suffers deeply enough, consciousness as he knows it will perhaps cease: 'I'm not suffering enough,' say both Clov and the Unnamable. Although he knows in his more truthful moments that his cosmology is only his own invention and that the whole 'college of tyrants' which he has postulated in order to give a meaning to his suffering is all an illusion, this cosmology is necessary to him if he is going to orientate himself in the void and grasp any insight into his condition.

This rejection of the world and of human kind is not only not perverse, as we have seen, but the result of what would seem to be a still more fundamental compulsion. As has been said, for the Beckett’ characters, all that is not God is nothing. The force at work beneath the words is recognizable as the spiritual compulsion of the mystic in all its austerity; a compulsion that is written out as if it were a penance and which rejects all that is not God's as negative and indifferent. As Horace Gregory has written in his essay “Beckett's Dying Gladiators”:

“In his prose Beckett has sustained the ancient, sometimes parallel association of religion with poetry; and if at times they seem to vanish, they are just around the corner. Scratch an Irish poet, and if the scratch is deep enough to draw blood, the result, however heretical it may be, will be a religious poem”.

Beckett has rejected the power of reason and all claim to intellectual eminence and searched with a spiritual intensity for the presence that ought to be at the centre of the universe. Not finding that presence he cannot escape the conviction that such a world is worthless. In a world without the divine presence at its core the whole expanse is a valley of bones and everything in it equally valuable and equally valueless. One can make no distinction between the affirmative qualities such as love or friendship and the opposites of hate or hypocrisy. As Molloy murmurs, on finding himself in a new dwelling:

“it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter. It's good to have a change of muck”.

Where Beckett differs from the early mystics, however, is that even before he commences to search he knows that what he is looking for does not exist. He is without a centre of conviction to which he can return in times of emergency and must suffer the torture of an unquenchable thirst (a recurrent symbol) in a world where water not only appears unobtainable but, which is more likely, is non-existent. Deprived of any certainty the hero disgusts even himself and, as he describes, even rats refuse to live beside him. Repeating over and over, from place to place, the eternal, tortuous, burdensome questions in his brain he despairs of ever finding peace.

He suffers many illusions of arrival and has created, in the contemplation of numbers (“not count! one of the few pleasures in life”) in the riding of bicycles (for example Belacqua “who could on no account resist a bicycle”) or in the sucking of stones picked up on the sea-shore, harbours of relative quiet in the course of his journey. But he tires of these harbours very quickly. The second time Murphy attempts to capture the pneumatic bliss of sitting in a chair in a Lyon's Corner House is not so rapturous as the first, and Pozzo observes that the second pipe full one smokes cannot compare with its predecessor. Man's ultimate freedom, says Beckett, taking his image from the Cartesian Geulincx, is similar to the freedom of the galley slave who lays down his oar to crawl eastward under the whip while the boat is sailing West, and the nearest one can approach to peace or happiness is of a similar nature.

The hero, born into “a veritable calvary with no limits to its stations and no hope of crucifixion”, is neither able to accept the place he has arrived at, out of fear that further on he might discover a more harmonious place of rest; nor see the advantage of going on to a haven which in all probability does not exist. For example “Molloy”:

“For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on”.

The hero therefore moves forward perpetually but with an extremely hesitant motion, frantically desiring to cease yet determined to arrive at this problematic and elusive destination. His dilemma is heightened by the existence, at moments when he almost believes he has reached the end, of a voice bidding him to continue. The voice calls him back from the expiatory task that is his from birth, and demands that he should face the image of his condition which he prefers to forget. Thus the hero batters upon the limits of his being, attempting the impossible end, and, like the figure in “Act Without Words” who continually tries to leave the stage but always fails, he is repeatedly repulsed, sent sprawling back into the excruciating tension of a life where to stay where one is and to attempt to move a little further along the way creates a need which in the given circumstances of this world can never be resolved.

II.2 “THE FAILURE” in Beckett’s novels

The word “failure” also lies at the core of Beckett's own poetics. To write, for Beckett, is necessarily to fail, and literature in the traditional sense, with its promise to enlarge man's experience and to explore or resolve his relationship with the world about him, is rejected as an illusion. His books, if they concern themselves with these earlier purposes, do so in order to mock them, and to emphasize the impotence of an art that seeks to discover some ultimate deep where the particulars are reconciled in a universal and meaningful whole: “it's for the whole there seems to be no name”. This strange position of creative futility is not only expressed by his characters; it is also at the heart of Beckett's own brief but important attempts to define the nature of his task.

Much of what Beckett thinks about his own activity is contained in the works themselves. His writings have the additional dimension of being, in the act of their writing, a critical examination of the form in which they are cast. The trilogy, whatever else it may be, is an observation on the residual nature of a work of fiction, on a creation of the imagination that tells of human beings, the events and feelings that make up their lives, and all the incidental means writers have used, from Defoe to Joyce, to keep the reader contented and credulous. Likewise the plays reveal and comment on the nature of a dramatic presentation, demonstrating through their structure and dialogue, exactly what is taking place when one group of people spend two hours observing the posturings of another group upon an elevated platform. Beckett works with the basic resources of his form. His fiction is limited to the activity of a man in a room writing words in a notebook, the simulacrum of all novelists.

As Beckett is summing up:

“There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred.”

Beckett acknowledges the obsessive nature of his task. He has written about man in book after book, portraying him in such decay that he appears to be almost nothing. But precisely because he is nothing, all the attempts to return him to a meaningful plane of the feasible are simply acts of bad faith. These attempts place around him a semblance of a metaphysical order that is not there; the whole agony of his absurd situation is that he is trapped into defining a meaning where one no longer exists. As Beckett explains it in “Watt”:

“For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.”

The exponent of this impossible art, is a familiar figure among the images of our century. He is the well known amalgamation of clown and tramp; an alliance of the comically-absurd with the pathos of rejection. Beckett's art draws deeply on the anti-literary tradition of the clown as he has appeared in the circus, the vaudeville and on the silent screen. In this figure he has detected both a companion traveler into the realm of failure and a fellow sufferer on the cross of the Cartesians.

Expelled into the world (the first, irrevocable pratfall), the clown is left to turn his own evident incapacity in the art of living into a mechanical parody of that art performed well. The clown is a suitable exponent of the art of failure because he too is concerned with virtuosity to no end. However finely wrought and aptly phrased the words of the Beckett hero may be they will never succeed in encompassing the great end he demands of them. Similarly, however brilliantly and intently the circus clown may imitate the acrobat or the juggler, he is fated to miss the rope, drop the balls or lose his trousers (like Estragon). Kenner has seen “ Emmet Kelly's solemn determination to sweep a circle of light into a dustpan” as the source of the plays, and the comparison is apt for what Kelly is presenting is an image of impotence. It is this area of man's striving, ignored by artists hitherto concerned with the plane of the feasible, that interests Beckett.

Beckett's constant obsession with the philosophy of Descartes also finds expression in the figure of the clown. Exactly what importance Descartes has for Beckett is best discussed in connection with Murphy where the hero is the first in a succession of suffering Cartesians tormented by the legacy of the French philosopher. Murphy's desire to “come alive in his mind” and to abandon the alleged superfluity of the body is understandable only in terms of Cartesian thought. The apparently insoluble problem of the disparity between mind and matter, which follows from Descartes’ initial discovery of himself as a “thinking thing”, fascinates and disturbs each of the heroes in turn.

The impotence that concerns Beckett is mental as well as physical. The fallibility of the body soon ceases to be of paramount importance, and the tenacious, recurrent problems of the mind come to the fore. Beckett has renounced his own claim to erudition and uses the large body of knowledge at his disposal only as an incidental means of expression. Proust's creatures, says Beckett, are the victims of time: “There is no escape from the hours and the days.” Their aspirations are condemned to disappointment because attainment is betrayed by the passing of time in which “The subject has died—and perhaps many times—on the way.” The Self, where it impinges on time, is in a constant state of flux, and the individual holds within himself many selves, each changing under the influence of time.

Other of Beckett's preoccupations make their appearance in this study of Proust. The most evident is “that desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love,” which brings with it the attendant concerns of isolation, non-communication and the discontinuity of the personality. He examines Marcel's love for Albertine and discovers the tragic impossibility of fulfillment. Beckett sees in Proust the seed of his own later hatred of love. Love gives an appearance of unity, holds out a hope of joy and represents a demand for the whole, but its end is always disaster. The lover makes the sudden discovery that behind the innumerable illusions of love lies the nothingness of the void. At the heart of both Beckett and Proust is the knowledge that in the act of physical possession, the possessor actually possesses nothing.

Love emphasizes the “irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.” It throws the fragmented “I” back from its hope of unity into the knowledge of its inconstant isolation. Nevertheless it is a more respectable mode of communication than friendship. Love, says Beckett after Proust, is a function of man's sadness, and the failure to possess may have the nobility of the tragic. Friendship, on the other hand, is “the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible.” It is “merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic.” These attitudes of personal relationships, first stated in “Proust”, help to explain the feelings which Beckett's heroes have for the rest of mankind. The determination of the hero to maintain his isolation, in the novels, and the ambivalent love-hate relationship of the series of pairs, in the plays, are illuminated by this discussion of love and friendship in “Proust”.

In the end Beckett's heroes are left waiting, like the figures in Dante's Ante-Purgatory, for the gate to be unlocked and the angel to guide them on their way to Paradise, but with the important difference that waiting remains the limit of their progress. The stasis is unrevoked; the angel, like Godot, does not come. Yet neither does their life in time regress; earth is the purgatorial now between before and after. Beckett calls “the austral sea,” that emerges the tremor of an archetypal association which extends this image of Purgatory. For the sea, which stretches away from the earth into the unknown and against which man is nothing, has repeatedly aroused overtones of the eternal. On earth man is finite, but in the sea he finds an image for the eternity from which he has come and to which he will soon return.

But the most trenchant example is Molloy's journey to the seaside in search of sucking stones. He recalls that “Much of my life has ebbed away before this shivering expanse,” and describes some of the advantages of life on the sea-shore: the excitement of digging holes in the sand, how one's sight improves with the uninterrupted view, and the pleasure of living in caves. This disappearance into the unseen distance of the ocean is as close as Molloy comes to being a speck in the void, at one with nothingness. It raises one of the frequent imponderables in Beckett's work, and creates the poetry of uncertainty which gives to his writing those moments of intimation with their suggestion of a half-forgotten, preconceptual and non-rational truth.

Thus Dante, in the person of Belacqua, gave Beckett an image for the condition which he has explored with obsessive honesty throughout his work. Belacqua with his certainty of eternity and Beckett's hero with his dubious hope, both cling tenaciously to the rock overlooking the infinite sea where they dream again the events of their past and suffer the Purgatory of waiting for the final voyage into bliss. In Beckett's beginning is his end for, true to the dictum he applauded in “Proust”, his later writing is a descent into the area originally suggested by the character and fate of a one-time lute maker of thirteenth-century Florence.

II.3 Beckett’s fiction

To read Samuel Beckett’s novels can be disconcerting and frustrating. They seem to defy all classification, evade all possible definition. Their unorthodox form, their lack of elements essential to the nature of fiction, their deceptive use of language, their apparent incoherence, and above all their ambiguous suggestiveness may indeed lead to contradictory interpretations. However, a patient reading of these works reveals new concepts of fiction, and an original vision of man’s existential dilemma. This vision was shaped progressively over a period of three decades during which Beckett exploited, in a large number of works, a complex and paradoxical method of creation. The ultimate result of these experiments produced the unusual work entitled “Comment c’est” (1961).

To comprehend this novel, the unprepared reader must not only rid himself of all preconceived notions he may have of the novel form, but he must also investigate Beckett’s earlier achievements. To approach Beckett’s universe through his novels is a rather disturbing experience. Readers of fictions are accustomed to find even in the most fantastic novels, if not a familiar landscape, at least characters and landmarks which offer physical verisimilitude to man and to the real world. Surrealist literature may present distorted images in twisted verbal expressions, yet these visions of the subconscious reflect external reality.

The fundamental idea behind Beckett’s fiction can be termed an affirmation of the negative. This paradoxical artistic undertaking becomes an investigation, an exploitation of opposites. Beckett substitutes ignorance for knowledge, impotence for creativity, lethargy for efficiency, confusion for understanding, doubt for certainty, lunacy for rationality, illusion for reality, and so on. These opposites are his fields of exploration. By their very form and content the novels of Samuel Beckett question the validity of those criteria by which fictions is rendered useful and believable – useful as a social, psychological, and even as a political or religious document; believable as the story of rational human beings existing in as a sensible world.

While inventing stories and characters that annihilate their own shape and existence, Beckett offers a means of destroying, but also of purifying the traditional novel. If the muddy landscape presented in “Comment c’est
bears little resemblance to whatever knowledge one may have of real or fictional worlds, it is because this novel is not a projection of reality, but an experiment in willful artistic failure: the rejection of reality. It reveals in the course of its narration the chaos and agony of its creative movement. One can read this book as a satire of fiction – a masochistic expression of the creative act, or of all human actions. If this novel is successful, it is because it achieves what it set out to do: expose its own failure.

Failure and nothingness, the goals of this novel, become aesthetic experiences; the action of writing becomes a metaphor for the novel itself. As he proceeds toward his inevitable failure, the narrator-hero suffers the creation before the reader’s eyes: he calculates what remains to be done, recognizes the uselessness of what hes been written, acknowledges the errors and finally concludes with satisfaction: “bon bon fin…”

The narrative consists of utterances: confused recapitulations of the narrator’s journey toward Pim, of his recollections of how it was with Pim. Pim’s obsessive presence governs the narration, gathers the past, present and future into a single statement: “HOW IT IS”. This recurrent statement of fact negates all possible change, all possible hope of progress and order. Beckett stated in an interview: “Confusion is not my invention…it is all around us and open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of”. The whole novel lies in the realm of uncertainty. This fantastic world of mud, of absurd physical and mental permutations, exists simply as a metaphorical impression which can crumble into chaos whenever the narrator chooses.

“En attendant Godot” made its author famous, as the phrase goes, overnight. Or not quite overnight: word took a little time to get around, and so did the play. It was published in October 1952, about three years after it had been written, and first performed at the Théatre de Babylone in Paris the following January. The author's English version was published in 1954, performed in Great Britain in 1955, and finally brought before American audiences in 1956.

“Waiting for Godot”: like “The Waste Land” a generation previously, those three words make a time's emblem. He was understood to be Irish, and to live in Paris, where for some reason he insisted on writing in French. He was also said to have had something to do with Joyce.

As knowledge goes this was not much, and fancy soon made the inevitable surmise that he was a great pessimist, too gloomy to speak. There were rumours of a new play in which he had expressed his opinion of the human race by placing actors in refuse bins. There were also said to be novels, pessimistic likewise. English versions of these began to appear in 1955, and the fact that almost the whole first half of Molloy was one huge paragraph seemed to verify another suspicion, that his work was automatic writing, disdaining revision. This hypothesis also served to account for a certain wavering in the narrative's progression. Pessimist or no, automatic writer or no (both notions were contested), he had anyhow given the decade its label.

Though his first published writing ( 1929) was a contribution to a symposium on Joyce, Beckett has published very little criticism and contributed little, and that little diffidently, to theoretical discussion of the art he practises. In the early years he mostly wrote poems and stories, many of which lie in periodical backfiles where their author judges they may as well remain. A few of the stories will be detaining us, only because they have lately been reprinted. The author's consent to this was extremely reluctant, and the British reprint was hors commerce. The poems in Echo's Bones ( 1936) seem to constitute the only early work he values at all. They may be found in Poems in English ( London, 1961; New York, 1963). Written just before and just after the vagabond years commenced, they preserve complex hermetic miseries.

They are strangely frozen poems: a day fixed, a mood fixed, as it were for later thawing. Later work has drawn on them repeatedly. Early stories appropriated actual stretches of their wording; mature plays and fictions transpose their often obliquely stated situations, but sublimated, tranquillized. In the poems image follows image with a kind of violence which we may guess only the tranquillity of sublimation renders tolerable to him through the long process of conceiving and revising an extensive writing. What the poems cost him, how alarming he still found their energies twenty years later, may perhaps be judged from a novel he began about 1955.

II.4 Beckett’s figurative language

The techniques in Samuel Beckett’s writing often runs parallel to those developed by twentieth-century nonrepresentational painters. Like them, Beckett rejects the notion that a primary function of art is to depict object that exist in the outside world. The painters who repudiated this realistic aesthetic went on to develop a new king of art, and Beckett’s aesthetic ideas have similarly led to novelistic innovations. In representational art, imaginary events are usually depicted as if they had actually occurred. Conventional novelists use vivid descriptions of an event to maintain verisimilitude; the accuracy of the settings heightens the illusion that the action is real and not imaginary. This is based on the idea – an underlying assumption in representational writing – that reality resides mainly in the outside world.

For Beckett’s characters the reverse is usually true. They seldom trust their impressions of the outside world, and what little reality they apprehend comes as a result of introspection. Beckett’s descriptions of the outer world are often the raw materials for metaphors depicting inner reality. It is unimportant whether the fictional entities conform to their material counterparts. Rather, the issue is how physical objects can be used in portrayals of the world of thought and feeling.

Thus, for example, if a character in a representational novel climbs to the top of a hill or tower and looks out at the view, one usually imagines the scene as if where taking place in the world. In Beckett’s works, such incidents may be about attaining a mental overview.

An important predecessor for Beckett in developing these figurative settings is Dante: the landscapes in the “Divine Comedy” are mainly significant in terms of what they contribute to his allegory of the afterlife. Another influence is Vico, whose ideas on language and metaphor Beckett discussed in an essay published in 1929.

Beckett has worked to develop a metaphorical language that conforms to this Viconian precept. Running through his fiction are extended mataphors that use descriptions of the surroundings to represent subtle and elusive concepts. In “Molly”, for example, Moran visits unfamiliar places, encounters strangers, and finally returns to the place from which he set out. These episodes can be seen as figurative descriptions of events that take place during journeys of exploration in the mind.

Understanding that Moran is undergoing such experiences on a mental plane – that is, seeing them as events imagined by an imaginary character – is only a preliminary step in interpreting them. Eventually they depict activities that go far beyond their ability to denote transactions n the outside world. Thus Moran’s comment that the face of a stranger he assaults resembles his own suggests that the stranger is somehow a version of Moran (Molloy, p. 206). This leads to the possibility that the encounter represents a confrontation with an aspect of his immature personality, and that the assault represents Moran’s effort to destroy some quality in himself that he detests. If the assault scene is linked with related episodes in the novel, such as Molloy’s attack on a charcoal burner, a pattern of extended metaphors begins to emerge. These extended metaphors, like Dante’s, have meanings on a number of figurative levels.

Beckett’s writing often centers on three main themes: living, thinking, and creating. Corresponding to these are extended metaphors that refer to the effects of time on human life; the meaning of thought, feeling, and selfhood; and the creative process involved in portraying such experiences. The quest of Molloy and Moran, on a literal level journeys through geographical regions, figuratively represent the characters’ lives as they are transformed by time; the exploration of regions of their minds; and the preparation of accounts of these experiences.

A similar point is illustrated in a passage where Malone says he has tried to “Live and invent”, focusing not on himself, but on “another, far beneath me” (Malone Dies, pp. 18-19). Often, Beckett’s extended metaphors are suitable through a number of works. An example is a series of locales where his heroes rest or seek shelter in the course of a journey. This type of setting can represent a refuge from the harshness of existence, an interlude in a journey of inner exploration, or a retreat from the rigors of the creative process. The places that figure in these metaphors include houses, asylums, rooms, shelters, cabins, stables, dens, caves, holes, urns, boxes, and areas of various geometric shapes. Such settings are linked by their figurative meanings in the same way that hills, towers, and other elevated places are connected by the idea of a mental overview.

The hierarchies of decline correspond to a different kind of deprivation that recurs in Beckett’s fiction. His heroes try to escape from the pain of existence by retreating into their minds. Initially the inner world seems like a pleasant refuge, but eventually it acquires connotations of death or imprisonment, like the “womb-tomb” in “Dream of Fair to Middling Women” and “Echo’s Bones”, or the “ivory dungeon” in “Text for Nothing 2”. A retreat into the mind can finally lead to a loss of freedom, comfort, friends, or even sanity.

When Beckett’s heroes explore the mind’s deeper recesses the settings become sparer: the empty desert in “Lesness” is an example. Metaphors involving asylums, rooms, or hovels reflect too much of conventional reality to suggest the distance between ordinary thought and the processes of these remote inner regions. Hence in later works the locales become more abstract. Even so, these locales have many links with the ones that are more conventional. A number of Beckett’s heroes are depicted near deteriorating structures that resemble the ruins of settings described in the earlier novels. In successive works the ruins continue to disintegrate until their rubble is ground down into sand and dust.

In “Fizzle8” there is a description of one of these settings, a desert where deteriorating structures are immersed in dust:

“Grey cloudless sky grey as far as eye can see long desert to begin. Sand pale as dust ah but dust indeed deep to engulf the haughtiest monuments which too it once was here and there. There in the end same grey invisible to any other eye stark erect amidst his ruins the expelled.” (Fizzles, p. 56)

Content and form work together in this passage: just as the desert is filled with ruins from an earlier era, the setting contains many references to places described in earlier works. The protagonist is called “the expelled”; he resembles other figures – like the hero of “The Expelled” – who are evicted from womb-like refuges.

Beckett’s method of associating related images is to create strings of metaphors. A string, in the sense it is used here, can be defined as a set of metaphors linked by transitional ideas. Because these strings have many interconnections, diagrams are useful for showing how their constituent parts are arranged. In the following diagrams, the transitional ideas are enclosed in parentheses and the connections are indicated by lines, thus:

Metaphor – (transational idea) – metaphor

The following diagram illustrates another point, that the idea of refuge links the rooms and ruins used as settings in various works:

Room – (refuge) – ruin

Along with elevated places, refuges, and confined areas, Beckett at times uses deserts, plains, and wastelands as settings. Such locales evoke feelings of isolation, emptiness, or artistic exhaustion. Dust is often a feature of these settings; it links them with images of decay and death.

Beckett also refers to the sea in order to introduce the idea of emptiness or desolation. Transitional metaphors like “ocean of dust”, are used to establish links between the sea and wasteland images. Some of Beckett’s heroes think about drowning or drifting out to the sea in a skiff, activities that have associations with losing one’s mind or one’s life. Other characters live in caves by the sea or visit places with a view of the sea. These images provide connections with the shelters and elevated places.

The idea of being lost or bogged down is developed in another group of settings that includes forests, thickets, swamps, and expanses of slush or mud. Here again Beckett establishes many connections with related sets of metaphors. In the following passage, forests and wastes are linked by the sense that both represent similar emotional situations: “But suddenly all begins to rage and roar again, you are lost in the forests of high threshing ferns or whirled far out on the face of wind-swept wastes…” (Malone Dies).

With the introduction of the idea of moisture, the metaphorical dust of the wastes can become mud or slush. In “Eh Joe” the phrase “Mud thou art” – a play on “dust thou art” – associates mud, dust, and death. The string dust – (rain) – slush is wryly introduced in “The Unnamable”: “old slush to be churned everlasting, now it’s slush, a minute ago it was dust, it must have rained (p. 163).

The significance of these metaphorical ideas is extended by verbal phrases that are used in conjunction with related nouns. Thus locales and activities with related figurative meanings are associated. The following list should make this clear:

Verbal Phrase Noun Source

See the view form monument Molloy, p. 11

See refuge in room The Expelled, p. 20

Be expelled from shelter Molloy, p. 80

Wander among ruins Malone Dies, p. 42

Travel across desert The Unnamable, p. 41

Fall into dust Fizzles, p. 59

Get lost in forest Malone Dies, p.53

Be set drift in sea Molloy, p. 92

These verbal phrases can act as transitions when they accompany different metaphors. Descriptions of being evicted from a room in a house owned by a woman, for example, are at times associated with the idea of being expelled from the womb. Thus expulsion is the transitional idea in the string room – (being expelled from) – womb.

In the following passage, the image of traveling through difficult terrain connects a number of diverse settings:

“I have gone through great thickets, bleeding, and deep into bogs, water too, even the sea in some moods and been carried out of my course, or driven back, so as not to drown”.

A link between the sea images of death is provided by the reference to drowning. Some of the heroes who drown still manage to survive, like the narrator of “Texts for Nothing 5”. He says he has “gone to the bottom more than once, under various assumed names” (Texts for Nothing). The apparent contradiction is resolved by the interpretation of another important series of metaphors – those that deal with dying. Beckett’s heroes endure a state of existence so miserable that it no longer can be called living. Therefore he calls it “dying”, and one of his heroes can die many times in the course of his life.

The images related to travel in difficult terrain can again be interpreted as aspects of living, thinking, and creating. Going through thickets, bogs, or water suggest being immersed in a squalid existence, sinking into the depths of the mind, or being inundated with artistic difficulties. A desert traversed by one of Beckett’s heroes can represent boredom with life, an exhaustion of thought, or a period of creative emptiness. Dying can stand for a miserable existence, diminished mental activity, or feelings of artistic impotence. Such parallel ideas in seemingly unrelated images add to the sense of underlying unity that exists throughout the system of metaphors.

This unity is enhanced by still another device: connections can be established, not only among individual metaphors, but among strings of metaphors. When this is done, the strings can be configured into a network that reveals how the constituent parts of the system are interrelated:

Skul–––-(white)––––-den––––(refuge)––––ruins

(dome-shaped) (shelter) (decay)

Rotunda––(confinement)—room–––-(decay)––––dust

(confinement) (expulsion) (ocean of dust)

Tomb–––(wombtomb)–-womb–––-(water)––––ocean

(death) (confinement) (water)

Grave–––(excavation)–-ditch––––(earth)––––mud

Listed here, of cours, are only some of the metaphors that make up the network. The magnitude of the system as a whole is suggested by the profusion and diversity of its constituent parts, the means by which metaphors and strings are connected, the various levels of significance sustained by the images, and the number of works involved in the network. Often, the strings of metaphors add to one another’s significance, and new meanings are evoked by the interconnections. This makes the network particularly suitable for depicting the depth and intricacy of complicated mental experiences.

The concept of a network reflects aspects of mental reality in another way. Its characteristic mode of interconnecting diverse elements resembles the mind’s way of moving from idea to idea by using transitions and associations. Even more, the network’s configuration is to some degree an analogue of the structure of the nervous system.

Beckett’s network is similar in a number of respects. The metaphors, like neurons, are connected by many interrelated elements. As the number of metaphors increase arithmetically, the number of ways of linking them rises exponentially. Even so, some aspects of reality are never adequately represented by their outward manifestations, and neurological description of the mind cannot evoke a sense of what it is like to think and feel. A similar point can be made about Beckett’s network of metaphors. Descriptions can go only part of the way from the undead words, dormant on the page, to the reactions that will eventually be triggered by these words.

Beckett’s extended metaphors can be understood on many levels. At the same time, their lack of rigidly fixed meanings invites readers to fill in any areas that might seem ambiguous. This again adds to the significance of Beckett’s writing. Given that he presents models of reality based on his own insights, he also encourages readers to reconfigure these models in the light of their own experiences.

There are some of the factors that make Beckett’s writing so profound. Ordinary language tends to simplify what it represents by suggesting that descriptions of things are in some sense congruent to the things themselves. In this way the importance of whatever was not described, or could not be described, is diminished. Beckett’s method of groupies clusters of interrelated ideas and endowing them with different levels of meaning reveals how things are always vaster and more intricate than their denotative equivalents. This is one of the great strengths of Beckett’s figurative language: it represents concepts so resistant to ordinary discourse that there is finally no other way they can be expressed.

CHAPTER IV

Infinite pessimism

IV.1 Time, Space, and Movement in Beckett's Work

Space, time, and movement: the three basic obstacles to vision in the Beckettian universe. Place, time, and action: the three unities of classical French theater, which suggest the same way of seeing the world as does painting in linear perspective. Classical art, whether dramatic or plastic, separated the time and space of the observer from those of the phenomenon observed, thus rendering vision possible. Beckett puts it this way: "The classical artist assumes omniscience and omnipotence. He raises himself artificially out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causality to his development" ( Proust, p. 62). Perspective was possible in the post-Renaissance theater because the dramatist and, therefore, the viewer were removed from the time, place, and action of the drama, and they possessed a stable and omniscient point of view that was clearly differentiated from that of any of the characters. Such stability was possible only in an era when people believed in the existence of another world—another kind of time and place—whose perspective they could imitate while viewing or creating works of art.

In Beckett's drama, on the other hand, the only point of view available to the dramatist and the spectators is as partial as that of the characters; we move along with them in the fragmented time and space that compose their universe, and while we may see them from a different perspective than that from which they see themselves, our vision is no more reliable nor stable than theirs. For we are observing people drifting purposelessly through the same undefinable, formless time and space that we ourselves inhabit; in our age, there exist no others. Vision in perspective requires distance between subject and object, in the theater as elsewhere. When limits are vague and constantly eroding, "here" and "there" and "now" and "then" become confused; continual movement, or "déplacement," which is the primary characteristic of Beckett's (and our) conception of space and time, impedes perception, whose prerequisite is stability. Now that our only conceivable universe is the one in which we live, there is no way to step outside it, even in our imagination, in order to escape the continually changing point of view inherent to observers who stand in the middle of their field of observation and who find themselves necessarily subject to all of its influences. Beckett states the problem in these words: "What elsewhere can there be to this infinite here?"( Texts for Nothing, 6, p. 102). The only believable alternative to the world in which we live is one in which we do not exist: if we call our universe into being by looking at it, when we no longer look, there remains precisely nothing .As long as God's eye organized the universe from above and beyond, an individual's perception was less problematic, for reality did not depend upon the human consciousness for its very existence. When Bishop Berkeley said "esse est percipi," he meant that our being comes from being perceived in the eye of God. When Beckett uses the same words at the beginning of Film, he is referring to the unstable, blurred, yet unavoidable self-perception that is now the only possible source of being: "All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being" (p. 11). Now that no above nor beyond is conceivable, there is no position from which to see. Indeed, there may no longer be anything left to see, either: "I see nothing, it's because there is nothing, or it's because I have no eyes, or both" ( The Unnamable, p. 410).

CONCLUSION

Part of Beckett’s importance as a cultural figure is that he blurs ordinary distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde. Because he was embraced so readily as a classic he was able, in effect, to smuggle ideas across the border of mainstream culture, and that achievement is, rightfully, his most celebrated: he has actually changed many people’s expectations about what can happen, what is supposed to happen, when they enter a theatre. Not surprisingly, then, many avant-gardists…perceive this achievement as already ancient history and assume that their own work represents a radical departure from Beckett’s. Actually, though, his work, particularly the media and late plays, remains in certain ways just as radical, as unassimilable into traditional structures of theatrical production.

Both Herbert Blau and Jonathan Kalb situate Beckett as belonging to an aesthetic which is both anterior to contemporary performance – and yet, in some ways, opens up areas which contemporary theatrical practitioners are only beginning to fully explore. While Beckett remains largely within a Modernist context, framed by a white, Western male epistemology, he is also attacking some of its central tenets. Indeed, I believe Beckett’s continuing significance lies in the weight of literary and philosophical heritage which even his most minimal plays evoke. Beckett’s work presents a sustained critique of this heritage and the extent to which it infiltrates even the most intimate areas of our experience.

Beckett’s later plays both parody the repressive mechanisms of logocentric representation and trace an alternative representational practice. They enact a continual, imaginative process of transformation and metamorphosis in which forms are not only dissociated from their meanings but form new syntheses, where the boundaries between the inner and the outer worlds, between the visible and the invisible, are eroded.

Beckett's real energy as a writer of prose is based on a single assertion: the line is written primarily for recitation, not recounting. What should concern us here is diction rather than syntax. If a story emerges – and sometimes it will despite Beckett's stubborn insistence that there is nothing to communicate and no vehicle for communication – it will be more celebrated for its telling rather than for anything that might get itself told along the way. Each of Beckett's encounters with the mechanisms of prose shares the same dubious fate as the one he doles out to his intrepid walktalker in From an Abandoned Work: "I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way." The human voice – rather than what is being voiced – is, miraculously, the vehicle of communication here. To be is to be heard.

The fiction he composed in English up until the end of the Second World War – that is to say through the completion of his novel Watt, which was written in Roussillon, in the south of France, during the years he was hiding from the Nazis can't quite figure out what it wants to be. For example, an anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found More Pricks Than Kicks "uneven. . . . there is a definite, fresh talent at work in it, though it is a talent not yet quite sure of itself." Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, was much more to the point. Noting that the vitality of the story "is in the presentation, which is witty, extravagant and excessive," Muir emphasized Beckett's ability to reduce everything to intellectual fantasy, to "extremely good and calculated and quite impossible talk" (emphasis mine). The reviews of Murphy were only slightly more upbeat. Dylan Thomas, reviewing it for the New English Weekly, observed that its author was "a great legpuller and an enemy of obviousness."

Beckett’s early English fiction is presented as a Swiftian social satire, and often in a sardonic tone. There the protagonists express their dissatisfaction with the world through extravagant actions which create a striking contrast with their conventional personalities. In the early French works, Beckett introduces ambiguous figures who appear to be suspended between the real world of man and an absurd region which they eventually identify as the world of fiction. The most recent French heroes find themselves totally alienated from reality, and because they have lost contact with the human condition, because they can no longer be held responsible to act as rational beings, their eccentricity appears quite compatible with their grotesque predicament. Thus, while the characters of Beckett’s earlier works remain bitterly antagonistic to society, its institutions and people, the French heroes assume complete indifference toward humanity. As they are progressively removed from a social environment, gradually dehumanized, they become more and more irresponsible and uncommitted to the affairs of man. Their sole concern is the self.

Conscious of the gravity of their condition, Beckett’s creator-heroes invent a surrounding and a life for themselves, however trite, meaningless, absurd, or fantastic these may be. They improvise their existence on the theme of self, with little respect for human norms. These creatures’ shapes, thoughts, words, and actions are as unpredictable as the notes which jazz musicians emit from their instruments.

Beckett’s novels may give the impression of being the same story told over and over again, nonetheless, from one work to the next a conscious effort is made to reduce fictional elements to a bare minimum. If Beckett has abandoned traditional dramatic perspective because of his loss of faith in the world order that made such a perspective possible, he has had to discover new techniques to tie together the elements of his drama.For, even though he presents a vision of a fragmented, diminishing, unseeable, purposeless universe and of a humanity which can find no place or identity in it, he does so in a highly formalized, controlled, and systematic manner. His drama does indeed portray the "mess" in which we all exist, yet it succeeds, if not in lending meaning to the objects of his representation, at least in endowing them with form. Beckett has achieved a new vision, one might even say a new perspective, to bind the fragments of his dramatic universe into a tightly structured, esthetically pleasing whole.He exploits all of the diverse ways in which drama can appeal to its spectators' senses and imaginations, creating visual and aural echoes that provoke profound resonances within the hearts and minds of his audiences. However, even though Beckett's meticulous craftsmanship and dramatic genius produce highly unified works, he leaves no doubt that what is being portrayed is a world where vision is impossible, due to the continual movement in time and space that infects all its inhabitants, observer and observed alike.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mintz: Beckett's Murphy—a Cartesian Novel in Perspective, XI, no. 3, Autumn, 1959;

Sigmund Freud, “Letter to Ernest Jones”, May 3, 1928, quoted in Max Schur, “Freud: Living and Dying”, New York: International Universities Press, 1972);

Horace Gregory, “The Dying Gladiators of Samuel Beckett” ( New York, 1961), p. 167;

McDonald, Rónán (ed). (2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge p17;

Israel Shenker, "Moody Man of Letters”, The New York Times, 5 May 1956; quoted in Cronin;

Casanova, Pascale (2007). Beckett. Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. Introduction by Terry Eagleton. Londres / New York : Verso Books;

Murray, Christopher, ed. (2009). Samuel Beckett: Playwright & Poet. New York: Pegasus Books;

Caselli, Daniela. Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism;

Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems in English and French. New York: Grove

Press, 1977;

Endgame and Act Without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1958;

How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964.;

More Pricks than Kicks. New York: Grove Press, 1972;

Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957;

Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1995;

Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press, 1954;