SOURCE: Doherty, Francis. “Paf, Hop, Bing and Ping.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 17 (autumn 1991): 23-41.

In the following essay, Doherty provides a stylistic examination of Ping and traces its revisions to gather further insight into the story.

Beckett's short prose work, Ping, of 1967 is a complex text which presents the reader with many difficulties. In the first place, the sentences which the reader has to confront are daunting in their tonelessness, their fragmentariness and their apparent randomness. Repetition of over-repeated collocations seems to have the effect of neutral counters endlessly shifted in patterns, without the usual comforting illusion of a voice apparently speaking through language and of some kind of a story being told. We seem to have come into a world of language stripped of significance with a slab of text which refuses the conditions of narrative. Readers have grown used over time to...