Stylistically and thematically, [First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, and The End] mark what is probably the most distinct transition in the entire [Beckett] canon. Shifting from the English third person (of More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, and Watt) to the French first person, Beckett creates a fictional hero and environment so uniquely and consistently characteristic that they are recognizable (although often changed in certain particulars) throughout the remainder of his published prose. The hero is no longer undecided, as the earlier heroes Belacqua, Murphy, and Watt are, between life in the macrocosm of the outer world or in the microcosm of the mind—his choice is the microcosm, a descent inward toward the core of the self…. This descent becomes a quest which, fully defined in the trilogy and developed ever more intensively in the subsequent fiction, undergirds all of Beckett's work as a dominant theme, the...