SOURCE: Fraser, Graham. “The Pornographic Imagination in All Strange Away.” Modern Fiction Studies 41, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1995): 515-30.

In the following essay, Fraser discusses the differences between “imagination” and “fancy” as they relate to the pornographic elements of All Strange Away.

On first looking into All Strange Away, one is struck by the change in tone between this and Beckett's other texts of the period. Rather than the measured rhythms of Imagination Dead Imagine, the dispassionate pseudo-empiricism of The Lost Ones, or the abstract patternings of Ping and Lessness, the reader is confronted with an intrusive, hasty, and humorless narrative imagination—and with a narrative which contains surprising passages of a coarsely sexual nature. This unusual quality has been located by critics in the voyeuristic or sexual concerns of the narrator and has on occasion been termed “pornographic” (Murphy 86, Pilling 139). And indeed, All Strange Away creates a climate of...