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 tribe of naked bodies pursues a barren existence. Crowded into a small space, each body has just enough room to stand. Since each is moved by the need to search "for its lost one" and indeed seems animated by nothing more than this necessity, some order must prevail in the cylinder for motion to be possible. (p. 164)

The Lost Ones far more concerns the limitations...