The title How It Is suggests that an answer is being given to the question, "How is it in the world, in this human life of ours?" That interpretation seems the more certain because of the nature of the narrative. The nameless narrator tells how he moves painfully through a world of warm mud. We hear that he meets another like himself, tortures him, and then finds that his victim has moved away in the mud. The narrator proceeds to speculate at large upon life in the muddy world. He draws up theories about his own experience being only part of a series of similar encounters in the mud, where pairs of beings are continually meeting; where each one plays in turn the part of the torturer and the tortured; and where the transition is made by the victim of the encounter crawling away to find some one else to torture, while his torturer lies supine awaiting the arrival of some new ex-victim to torture him. Perhaps (so he speculates) the population of mud-dwellers may be in millions. Yet, finally, the narrator confesses that what he has said is all a lie. He never met anyone in the mud. All that he knows for certain is the mud and himself lying in it.
For the most part, How It Is has been taken to be an imaginative presentation of Beckett's view of human existence. As several critics have pointed out, the work indeed contains most of the "basic ingredients" of Beckett's previous fiction. And it is undeniable that portraying the pain and meaninglessness of human life has been a central concern in all Beckett's writings. (p. 2)
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