In the following essay, Katz studies Watt as a transition between Beckett's life in Ireland and England and his move to France as well as between his early conventionally composed works and his later experimental writing.

In the following essay, Tassi suggests options for staging Shakespearian plays in light of Beckett's absurdist theater.

In the following essay, Tassi suggests options for staging Shakespearian plays in light of Beckett's absurdist theater.

In the following essay, Metman explores the different embodiments of God, treatment of women, and the depiction of the human condition in Beckett's earlier dramatic works.

In the following essay, Albert utilizes “Lessness” to test the narratological approach of Monika Fludernik's Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology.

In the following essay, Albert utilizes “Lessness” to test the narratological approach of Monika Fludernik's Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology.

In the following essay, Guicharn and Beckelman examine the irony of the characters' acknowledgement and awareness of their own existence in Beckett's plays.

In the following essay, Catanzaro argues that the dismembered bodies of couples in Beckett's works are metaphors for the failure of communication in relationships.

In the following essay, Catanzaro argues that the dismembered bodies of couples in Beckett's works are metaphors for the failure of communication in relationships.

In the following essay, Gontarski assesses Beckett's achievements as a short fiction writer.

In the following essay, Gontarski assesses Beckett's achievements as a short fiction writer.

In the following essay, Lawley probes Beckett's characters' tendency to leave the known—albeit unhappy—stability of their lives and throw themselves, unbalanced, toward death, chaos, and subsequent rebirth.

In the following essay, Elam illustrates Beckett's repetitive use of aged, disembodied heads and faces in his later short plays to represent death, darkness, the afterlife, and Hell on Earth. Elam makes many comparisons between these short plays and Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.

In the following essay, Mehta examines Ohio Impromptu as a modernist interpretation of the classic theatrical impromptu form.

In the following essay, Mehta examines Ohio Impromptu as a modernist interpretation of the classic theatrical impromptu form.

In the following essay, Miskinis examines Beckett's postmodern nihilism.

In the following essay, Miskinis examines Beckett's postmodern nihilism.

In the following essay, Boxall maintains that “First Love” signals a turning point in Beckett's writing style with his employment of the monologue form as well as his “oscillation between remembrance and invention as a form of storytelling.”

In the following essay, Boxall maintains that “First Love” signals a turning point in Beckett's writing style with his employment of the monologue form as well as his “oscillation between remembrance and invention as a form of storytelling.”

In the following essay, Hillenaar provides a psychoanalytical reading of “First Love.”

In the following essay, Hillenaar provides a psychoanalytical reading of “First Love.”

In the following excerpt, Cochran surveys Beckett's early short fiction, including his short story collection More Pricks than Kicks.

In the following essay, Connor analyzes the voices, sounds, silences, and use of repetition in Beckett's plays. Connor contends that without being able to depend on physicality, the sounds coupled with the repetitions create a “space” for the audience's inspection.

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

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

In the following essay, Wood analyzes Beckett's essays as lying on a continuum between systematic philosophy on one end and self-deconstruction on the other.

In the following essay, Wood analyzes Beckett's essays as lying on a continuum between systematic philosophy on one end and self-deconstruction on the other.

In the following essay, Garforth analyzes the plays Beckett translated and produced for performance in Germany, finding in them variants in language, style, and meaning.

In the following essay, Garforth analyzes the plays Beckett translated and produced for performance in Germany, finding in them variants in language, style, and meaning.

In the following essay, Praeger explores Beckett's views on language and linguistics by studying the writer's translation of his own work Mercier et Camier.

In the following essay, Praeger explores Beckett's views on language and linguistics by studying the writer's translation of his own work Mercier et Camier.

In the following essay, Malkin discusses Beckett's dramatic presentation of memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I.

In the following essay, Malkin discusses Beckett's dramatic presentation of memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I.

In the following essay, Morrison studies the prevalent motifs of sterility, abortion, sexual disability, deprivation, and futility in Beckett's dramas and novels.

In the following essay, Katz discusses Beckett's Molloy and First Love.

In the following essay, Katz discusses Beckett's Molloy and First Love.

In the following essay, Kloss identifies four short stories—“The End,” “The Calmative,” “The Expelled,” and “First Love”—as the turning point in Beckett's artistic career and provides a close reading of “First Love” to gain insight into the images, themes, and characterizations that came to preoccupy Beckett.

In the following essay, Kloss identifies four short stories—“The End,” “The Calmative,” “The Expelled,” and “First Love”—as the turning point in Beckett's artistic career and provides a close reading of “First Love” to gain insight into the images, themes, and characterizations that came to preoccupy Beckett.

In the following essay, Ayers applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogue to “First Love.”

In the following essay, Ayers applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogue to “First Love.”

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

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

In the following essay, Gontarski finds Play to be a crucial element in the formation of Beckett's theatrical sensibility.

In the following essay, translated from the French version originally published in the October 1957 issue of Etudes Anglaises, Mayoux highlights Beckett's “laying open” the essence of human existence in Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All That Fall, and The Unnamable.

In the following essay, Kumar argues that the chess symbolism in Endgame serves as a unifying element for the play as well as a metaphor for existential uncertainty and despair.

In the following essay, Kumar argues that the chess symbolism in Endgame serves as a unifying element for the play as well as a metaphor for existential uncertainty and despair.

In the following essay, Green presents Dream of Fair to Middling Women as a critique of the novel form.

In the following essay, Green presents Dream of Fair to Middling Women as a critique of the novel form.

In the following essay, Lawley concentrates on the roles that voice, silence, movement, and stillness play in illuminating defensive mechanisms of human existence in That Time.

In the following essay, Hunter determines the influence of Joyce's Dubliners on More Pricks than Kicks.

In the following essay, Thomas studies Happy Days for evidence of a subtext influenced by D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

In the following essay, Scholes approaches “First Love” as a hypertext and recommends that the reader explore links found in the story.

In the following essay, Scholes approaches “First Love” as a hypertext and recommends that the reader explore links found in the story.

In the following essay, Johansson explores Beckett's utilization of the apophatic approach, which is the theory that God is unknowable, in his short texts.

In the following essay, Johansson explores Beckett's utilization of the apophatic approach, which is the theory that God is unknowable, in his short texts.

In the following essay, Vandervlist identifies the repudiation of action as a unifying theme of the stories in More Pricks than Kicks.

In the following essay, Pireddu considers the disjointed and confused nature of the short texts in Fizzles, arguing that these texts “exhibit the idea of aborted endeavor as their constitutive element.”

In the following essay, Harrington investigates the influence of James Joyce on Beckett's short fiction, arguing that “A Case in a Thousand” is “the most apparent adoption in Beckett's early fiction of the style of Joyce's own early work.”

In the following essay, Harrington investigates the influence of James Joyce on Beckett's short fiction, arguing that “A Case in a Thousand” is “the most apparent adoption in Beckett's early fiction of the style of Joyce's own early work.”

In the following essay, Wilcher maintains that in his works, Beckett strives to defy definition and leave the audience/readers disconcerted, yet searching for their own understanding.

Just as the 'quality of language' in Proust was more important than 'any system of ethics or aesthetics' [according to Beckett], so the quality of an experience in Beckett's theatre becomes more important than any system of 'meaning' that might be extracted from the words of the text or from the 'symbolism' of the sets, characters, and actions. A dramatic art is created that is 'symbolic without symbolism'. The purpose of this arti...

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.

In the following essay, van Peer places “First Love” within the philosophical tradition of cynicism.

In the following essay, van Peer places “First Love” within the philosophical tradition of cynicism.

In the following essay, Fletcher finds similarities between Beckett's “Fingal” and James Joyce's “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

In the following essay, Fletcher finds similarities between Beckett's “Fingal” and James Joyce's “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

In the following essay, Kennedy argues that although Beckett's plays have postmodernist elements, they are fundamentally different from true postmodern works.

In the following essay, Connelly investigates the relationship between the short stories in More Pricks than Kicks and the visual arts, particularly the work of the Irish painter Jack Yeats.

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 pu...

In the following essay, Noble underscores the common characteristics of the language in Beckett's short stories and Derrida's language theory, contending that “the texts of Derrida and Beckett speak the same ideological and theoretical language.”

In the following essay, Noble underscores the common characteristics of the language in Beckett's short stories and Derrida's language theory, contending that “the texts of Derrida and Beckett speak the same ideological and theoretical language.”

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

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

[From] his earliest prose Beckett gives himself a persona, a personal representative whom he can know and probe as cosa mentale, yet he presents him at first as engaged in the non-existent external world, and his resource must then be to show the connexion as grotesque, so that the character alternately attempts it and withdraws from it, in burlesque indecision: this is what we may call the Belacqua phase of Beckett. More Pricks than Kicks (1934) is (as might be guessed from its obscene though unassuming ti...

Stylistically and thematically, [First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, and The End] mark what is probably the most distinct transition in the entire [Beckett] canon. Shifting from the English third person (of More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, and Watt) to the French first person, Beckett creates a fictional hero and environment so uniquely and consistently characteristic that they are recognizable (although often changed in certain particulars) throughout the remainder of his published prose. The hero is n...

In the following essay, Campbell situates Beckett's unpublished story “Echo's Bone's” within his earlier and later texts.

In the following essay, Campbell situates Beckett's unpublished story “Echo's Bone's” within his earlier and later texts.

The characters of Beckett's plays, from Waiting for Godot to those in the dramatic pieces comprising Ends and Odds, take their places in a playworld in which the atmosphere is permeated with a sense of the absurd. Invariably, Beckett's characters are metaphors for modern—or universal—man, puzzling over his inability to detect an intelligible pattern and suffering the consequent anguish of a futile search for meaning. The characteristic state of mind of a Beckett character is desp...

Beckett's humor seems inseparable from dead seriousness. All his best jokes depend on a double-edged attitude toward the fact of human creation. In order to laugh, the joker partly identifies with a God's-eye point of view, detached and "scientifically" neutral; yet we know and the speaker knows how devastating the consequences of the joke are for the speaker. In Happy Days Winnie says, "How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little joke...

Samuel Beckett's fictional world, especially Watt, contains a quasi-Rabelaisian parody of all the rhetorical and logical devices that have permitted Western man, like Beckett's Ubu-esque creation, the "man-pot" Mahood, to hold a "partially waterproof tarpaulin" over his skull. Describing, reasoning, discussing, examining—Beckett's characters never tire of these activities, though no two of them proceed in exactly the same way. They share our "de...

In the following essay, Cohn studies the layers of reality and unreality in Beckett's plays and discusses the characters' awareness of the symbiotic nature of these (un)realities.

Beckett's novels push the concern of art beyond its visible object, beyond even "the fiction of the artist" in the act of manipulating that object, and deep into the artistic consciousness as it perceives itself in action. Beckett uses the novel and the necessary presence of a narrator to focus on the problems that are inherent in the basic narrative task of telling a story, the act which is the narrative premise of his trilogy—Molloy, Molone Dies and The Unnamable—and of ...

The human condition, Heidegger says, is to be there. Probably it is the theater, more than any other mode of representing reality, which reproduces this situation most naturally. The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary quality: he is there. Samuel Beckett's encounter with this requirement afforded a priori, an exceptional interest: at last we would see Beckett's man, we would see Man. For the novelist, by carrying his explorations ever farther, managed only to reduce more on ev...

[In] contrast to the progression of Joyce's oeuvre, where each new work appeared more exhaustive and revolutionary than its predecessors, Beckett came to offer a modern regression. His career, as it developed, actually seemed to reverse the traditional picture of artistic development. Each new work of Beckett's shrank in length; minimal plot, social setting and characterization became yet more minimal. The logical point of termination began to look like silence, the pure blank page. This was t...

John Calder has estimated that, if the present production of books continues unabated, Beckett will by the year 2000 rank fourth behind Jesus, Napoleon, and Wagner among the most written about persons in the world! While it is understandable that the puzzles of this very puzzled man would provoke such a plethora of books and articles, it is rather ironic that a writer who is "at home on the path of silence" would command such a talkative audience. (p. 5) Beckett is not fully appreciated as wha...

One has to go back to Samuel Beckett's first published fictional work to find the image that is to figure almost continuously in the novels as well as in the plays, to find the character round which the Beckett world moved. The collection of short stories which make up the volume called More Pricks than Kicks relates the adventures of Belacqua…. Here is a stasis that was to pursue (or should it be pin down) those creations that were to stand out in so markedly an individual manner. Nor was it ...

The most basic questions [in criticism] have to do with what in conventional literature would be called character and setting. But Beckett's reduction has robbed us of the use of these terms; at best we can speak only of the person or persons described in the pieces and the various places occupied. Who are the persons and where are the places?… [The Beckettian hero] is Everyman on his way from womb to tomb, traveling a journey not of his own choosing, but one thrust upon him by some obscure bu...

The Lost Ones demonstrates, as clearly as any of Beckett's longer efforts in prose fiction, how much each successive work depends on what has preceded. This is not simply a matter of treating the familiar themes of fruitless motion, attrition, or the inevitable return to solitary confinement. Beyond these, the text reaches back to earlier works for both the details of the story and its narrative approach…. The text introduces us to a severely geometric world: the interior of a cylinder where a...

There is no literary parallel for [Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable,] the three books in which Samuel Beckett, releasing a certain violence of temperament evident in his earliest works and suppressed in Murphy and Watt, turned his face away from every accessible satisfaction, even from the familiar contours of his own language, and jettisoning the very matrices of fiction—narrator, setting, characters, theme, plot—devoted his scrutiny … to the very heart of novel writing: a man in...

[No] one has been more felicitous in illustrating black humor than Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days, as she asks the rhetorical question: "How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?"… (p. 89) One usually remembers with glee the scene in Gulliver's Travels where he tells about his arrival in the land of the Lilliputians and—frightening monster that he appears to be—has to submit to a min...

The setting of almost all of Samuel Beckett's work is that of Krapp's Last Tape, written in 1958: "A late evening in the future." The future is not a place, and not much of a time; it is a guess, a possibility, a threat. We may say it is in the head, and that is where Beckett's characters often think they are: in an "imaginary head," an "abandoned head"; "we are needless to say in a skull"; "perhaps we're in a head, i...

Perhaps because his father was not religious, Beckett seems to have felt no anguish in turning away from the Anglican beliefs of his youth; his mother, on the other hand, was deeply religious in a rather narrow evangelical way. Loss of faith, however, clearly has not prevented him from exploiting his Protestant heritage, any more than it prevented James Joyce from exploiting his Catholic one…. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man has made millions of readers aware of the thoroughness of Joyce�...

Company's fifty-seven pages make it rather an extended utterance from the master of compression whose appearances of the recent past have carried titles like Lessness, Ends and Odds, and Fizzles. What's more, it is a strikingly intimate book, arriving as something almost in the nature of a backstage pass, an invitation to the studio, and thus offering unique pleasures for admirers of Beckett's work. But this is a tale for careful telling, of necessity oblique. (p. 429) [Beckett] has com...

In English the Irish are the great sentimentalists. The dour Scots, the babbling Welsh, and the destiny-laden English are not in it for sheer heart-wringing sentiment, the chuckle that stops short in a sob, the tear in the sparkling eye. Pause now for an ad hoc definition: sentimentality emphasizes not the racking passions—snarling hatred, implacable resentment, love that makes the heart leap in its bone-cage—no, not those, but the retrospective melancholy of sweet love lost, life's int...

Most of Beckett's characters have, to put it mildly, come down in the world. From the heroic heights of freewheeling movement that some of them achieve on bicycles, they journey backwards down the evolutionary ladder to a reptilian crawling in mud, or even to the vegetable condition of Winnie in Happy Days…. Virtually all of the quotations Winnie uses come from literature that is concerned with confronting death or with despair at the limited amount of time we have on earth. Beckett knows how ...

With every new thing that Samuel Beckett has written there has been the temptation to say "Here at last is the real Beckett: this is where it was all leading." That has allowed one again and again the retrospect needed in order to set out the true configuration of his work, to get his measure—in short, to have done with him. Until, unforgivably (can the man not take a hint?), more words of his arrive and we have to go through the process again. And now there is the awkward, obtrusive pr...

Who reads Beckett? As opposed, that is, to watching his stuff on stage or on television. One doubts if they are all that many…. But publishers appear to believe in the persistence of readerly interest, and in its variety; so that Beckett is made available, and to an extent surely unique among living authors, for communion—oecumenically, as it were—in a most interesting variety of kinds…. [Worstward Ho] is for the steady customers, whoever they are, the people waiting, one imagine...

The roots of modern tragicomedy lie in Chekhov, who was the first important modern playwright to make art out of the representation of the qualities of life rather than its actions…. His innovation made possible, though he did not know this, a purely theatrical theater, of which the modern epitome has been reached in the plays of Samuel Beckett. (p. 386) All of Beckett's plays are "games" for actors. In these games the audience also has a role to play, one that allows a certain f...

Though the originality and durability of Beckett's novels and plays assure his reputation as a major writer of our time, his work as poet has attracted far less sympathetic attention. All the while expanding that "gallery of moribunds" he has made so authentically his own, Beckett has been writing poems on the sly…. Distilled from the hardy irregularities of Joycean rhetoric, Beckett's voice in verse has the same haunting cadence, the same "dour questing," th...

A special continuity runs through Beckett's works. On almost any page of his numerous novels, stories, plays, and even poems, the words conspire to create a sense of déjà vu: "I've seen this before," every reader responds. Within each work itself, certain lines return to haunt the narration, inspiring an overwhelming sense of remembrance. The same words that inhabit his earlier writings return in Beckett's newest novel, Company, but something other than the f...

From first to last, Samuel Beckett celebrates life while waiting fearfully for the arrival of death cloaked in the "old terror of night." His three new short plays … are epilogues to a "Catastrophe," to borrow the title of the evening's centerpiece. Each of the plays is an end game. Together, including two intermissions, they last only 70 minutes. In that brief time, they tantalize the mind as well as the eye. In Beckett's lifetime of art, his themes have rem...

As you would expect, the situation [in Company] is as you would expect. A narrator narrates about someone almost terminally deprived, who may or may not be the narrator himself and of whom what can be said is debatable but in any case exiguous. The fiction exists on the brink of non-existence, and through proposition and counter-proposition constantly threatens to cancel itself out. Yet this minimalism and self-contradiction make it both a touching metaphor for human life and a vehicle through which the lar...

"Company" reports on a life from the inside; it is striking evidence of the primacy of mind over matter in the heavily documented world of modern literature. Early in his career Beckett announced that a writer's task is excavatory, his goal "the ideal core of the onion" (without tears). Many of his fictional characters, turning their attention inward, hear voices in their heads. One character even tells us: "I began to think, that is to say to listen harder."...

Samuel Beckett is the greatest living master of the English language. When it comes down to the elemental craft involved in placing one word next to another he has no equal, indeed he has no close rival. Few would seriously attempt to deny this. But many would go on to add that the purposes to which he puts his artistry somehow constitute a sad waste, as if in selecting his austere subject matter he has deprived us of some beautifully written tales of family life or of a series of panoramic novels about soc...

Beckett is the great master of less is more, of the fertile silence and the echoing nuance; no other living dramatist is so free of cant, sentimentality and verbal fuss. If he now sometimes gives the impression of parodying himself or, less harshly, of working and reworking familiar materials, it doesn't much diminish my pleasure in his work. (p. 123)

Samuel Beckett is unquestionably the greatest playwright of the second half of our century. But he was always a minimalist, exulting in making do with less even as he strikingly evoked the daily depredations of existence on our decreasing potencies. He allowed his characters to do less and less, as his dramatic means became more and more stripped down. No further paring down is possible, yet Beckett continues to whittle away. In the corner into which he has deliberately painted himself, he can only bang his...

"A unique moral figure," I wrote of [Beckett] five years ago, "not a dreamer of rose gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the wasteland, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere." It's 30 years—is that conceivable?—since he wrote "Godot," a play still perfectly vital, its eloquence spare then, still spare now, het positively garrulous by the standards he sets himself today....

Among living writers, I most admire Samuel Beckett because he is the least living of them. "Imagination Dead Imagine," he says, as if he already speaks to us from the other side. Nothing in his work is the least fashionable, and yet no other writer—not even Virgil or Dante—has been more avant-garde than Beckett. And very few writers—excepting Swift and Kafka—have been so funny and terrifying at once as Samuel Beckett. The great ones always speak from the other side&...

All the literary turns of [Beckett's] work never obscure his vital presence for me—that of an Irishman talking on and on, endlessly imagining forms, his words, pauses, silences mysteriously reinventing our sense of reality and time. No one writing today takes such complete pleasure in language as Beckett. No one is as conscious of the responsibility and delight of passing that pleasure on to his audience. (p. 58) Maureen Howard, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1977 by ...