Dante and the Lobster Chapter Summary & Analysis | Analysis

Analysis

Samuel Beckett's short story "Dante and the Lobster" describes an afternoon in the life of Belacqua. We don't know much about Belacqua, only that he is studying Italian and that his feet cause him a great deal of pain.

What is obvious about Belacqua is that he seems to become easily bogged down with the details of his life. As the story begins, he is struggling to understand a portion of Dante's Paradiso. While it seems as though he is committed to learning the complexity of the prose before him, when the clock signals the mid-day hour, he quickly puts his work aside and sets about the task of making his lunch. It is interesting that, for as much as that passage perplexes him during the morning, when the time set aside for study is over, finding the answers no longer seems important to him. We begin to see that...
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