SOURCE: Brater, Enoch. “Opening Lines: Reading Beckett Backwards.” Samuel Beckett Today 6 (1997): 19-29.

In the following essay, Brater studies the uniqueness of many of the opening lines from Beckett's plays, explores their portent, and probes the non-linear aspects of the plays.

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Although Beckett has often been discussed as a modernist writer of termination, of “reckoning closed and story ended,” his work as a whole displays a remarkable range of beginnings. Even before he took up writing for the stage seriously, he had calculated on the effect of opening a story with a line an early piece of fiction might have called a real “stinger.” Murphy, the novel published in 1938 by Chatto & Windus, opens with a serious and memorable non-starter: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet, which begins so promisingly with a suspenseful “Who's there?,” here the sense of an endgame is...