He has been labeled Proustian, Joycean, Sartrean, Jungian, and even a Christian writer, but while he does exhibit characteristics of each, it would be reductive to limit him to any single one. In his later years, both his drama and fiction took an intensely personal turn, and critics who had viewed Beckett as a disinterested theoretician, impersonal philosopher of negation, or abstract mathematician obsessed by permutation and combination began to recognize the extensive biographical underpinnings which are the foundation of his theoretical musings. Katharine Worth writes that "Beckett can only be surely placed as a man of many facets, the writer above all who has sensed the deep movements of the modern imagination and found spellbinding images to express them."
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Stillorgan district of Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, a date to which he imparted significance in some of his dramatic writings and a date which had an almost mystical significance to him in his personal life. Both the Christian belief in Good Friday as the date of the death of Christ and the attendant theory that one of the two thieves who was to have been crucified with him was saved while the other was damned are ideas which Beckett used in various forms throughout his writings.
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