Beckett is Irish as was Joyce; but there is no sign that the politics of Irish independence ever disturbed Beckett as they did the writer who was eighteen years his senior…. Beckett makes only vague, distant, and occasional allusions to Ireland in his fiction. Names of characters apart, a couple of hundred words deleted from his four-hundred-page trilogy would efface every recognizable vestige of Ireland and the Irish. Irish folklore and Irish humor hardly exist in Beckett's world, even for purposes of parody or sardonic comment…. Beckett could much more properly, be described as a Parisian who was born in Ireland…. (pp. 90-1)

Beckett is … [close] to wholly mythless man; the philosophical problem which preoccupies him is the relation or non-relation between the mind and exterior reality, and to this problem ecclesiasticism, with all its trappings, is wholly irrelevant. Joyce sees through the exterior tegument of the world...