SOURCE: Cloonan, William. “Placing the Unplaceable: The Dilemmas of Samuel Beckett's Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (winter 2001): 1009-18.

In the following essay, Cloonan discusses several of Beckett's novels.

Samuel Beckett easily divides into groups of two, the Anglo/Irish writer and the French author, the playwright and the purveyor of often unsettling fictions. However, the initial dichotomy in large measure quickly resolves itself, since the translator of the French texts into English is the author himself. More troublesome is the distinction between the very successful dramatist, whose works have fascinated audiences ranging from Parisian sophisticates to lifers at San Quentin, and the novelist whose hermetic fictions have had little appeal outside the academic community, whose brooding mindscapes have evoked little resonance among the practitioners of contemporary English and French fiction.

Yet of the two Becketts, the novelist is perhaps the more fascinating. Serious readers of modern fiction are...