Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989) playwright, novelist

Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, to William Beckett, a surveyor, and Mary Jones Beckett. He completed his secondary studies at Portora Royal School in Northern Ireland and went from there to Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a B.A. in French and Italian in 1927 and subsequently earned an M.A. in 1931.

Shortly after receiving his B.A., Beckett accepted a teaching position at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he met his lifelong friend and mentor, James Joyce. While in Paris and under Joyce’s tutelage, Beckett learned the craft of writing. He wrote an essay entitled “Dante . . . Bruno . . . Vico . . . Joyce” (1929), on Joyce’s yet unreleased Finnegans Wake.

Beckett eventually abandoned teaching and spent the 1930s in Dublin, London, and Paris, struggling as a writer. In 1933 he published a collection of 10 short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, which describe the youth, middle age, and death of Belacqua, a character Beckett took from Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy. Four years later, and after 43 rejections, Beckett finally published Murphy (1937), his first novel, which focuses on its title character, a Dubliner living in London, who is so dissatisfied with the chaos of the world around him that he spends the majority of his time strapped in a rocking chair exploring his own mind.

Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance for his service to the French Resistance in World War II. After the war, still living in France and writing in French, he began work that would establish him as one of the 20th century’s most important novelists and playwrights. The first of his important postwar writings was a trilogy of novels: Malloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). All of these books feature disconnected, alienated narrators living almost entirely within the confines of their own minds or imaginations.

One year later Beckett produced Waiting for Godot (1954), a play about two men standing beside a country road waiting for a man called M. Godot. The critic H. A. Smith has praised this as “the most comprehensively and profoundly evocative play of the last thirty years.” Beckett went on to write a number of equally provocative plays, including Endgame (1957), about the horribly repetitive and almost deathlike lives of two disabled characters; and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960), which tells the story of an elderly man reviewing his life by listening to snippets of a tape-recorded journal that he began in his youth. All of Beckett’s plays challenged the dramatic form by reducing casts to one or two characters and sets to the most basic elements, often a single tree or a table and chair on an otherwise empty stage.

Critical Analysis. Beckett’s trilogy of Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable established his primary themes—dis- connection from the world and the artist trapped within his own mind—as well as a stream-of- consciousness style that runs throughout the rest of his work. The main characters of each novel become so disconnected from the world that they even lose track of where they are or how they got there. At the beginning of the first novel, for instance, Molloy remarks, “I am in my mother’s room,” but goes on to say, “I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone.”

Molloy and Malone, the narrator of the trilogy’s second novel, share a sense of separation from the world, and both feel compelled to tell their tales or become artists. As they try to do this, however, they fall deeper and deeper into their stories until they can no longer distinguish between themselves and the narratives they are creating. This difficulty progresses through the trilogy until, in The Unnamable, as the title suggests, the narrator is entirely subsumed by his narrative and is never even named.

While all of the novels use a stream-of-con- sciousness style, with the narrators reporting their thoughts to the reader as they occur, the technique dominates The Unnamable more than any other. Near the novel’s end, the narrator simply pours words upon the reader, stopping, it seems, only for a breath:

Now I can speak of my life, I’m too tired for niceties, but I don’t know if I, ever lived, I have really no opinion on the subject. However that may be I think I’ll soon go silent for good, in spite of its being prohibited. The, yes, phut, just like that, just like one of the living, then I’ll be dead, I think I’ll soon be dead, I hope I find it a change.

Waiting for Godot is one of the landmarks of 20th-century literature. The two-act play is con- cise—it contains only two important characters, Vladimir and Estragon, and takes place in a single location—and minimalist, with a set composed of only a lone tree and a country road. The play centers on conversations between Estragon and Vladimir, who spend two days waiting beside a country road for a person named M. Godot, who never appears. While waiting, the two discuss issues ranging from their hats and boots to their religions and the possibility of hanging themselves, which flares up only to quickly die, like so many of their topics.

Waiting for Godot, with God embedded in Godot’s very name, has been described as a Christian allegory. The critic John Gassner has remarked that it “presents the view that man, the hapless wanderer in the universe, brings his quite wonderful humanity—his human capacity for hope, patience, resilience, and, yes, for love of one’s kind, too, as well as his animal nature—to the weird journey of existence.” Other critics have praised the play for its manipulation, or breaking, of several dramatic conventions. Beckett’s starkly empty set marks a departure from standard 20th- century drama, which typically uses elaborate sets and even multiple settings, but Beckett’s more compelling change is his method of developing, or not developing, his characters through action. While conventional drama uses action to create clearly defined, individual figures, Beckett’s protagonists engage in mindless, fidgeting action (removing their pants or tugging on pieces of rope to test their strength) that does not distinguish one from the other but, in the words of the scholar David Pattie, “leads inexorably to the blurring of distinctions between characters.”

Krapp’s Last Tape is Beckett’s most concise play, consisting of a single character named Krapp, a 69-year-old man who sits alone in a dark room reviewing his entire life by listening to audio recordings of himself talking at various points throughout his life. As he listens to fragments of tapes from his youth, middle age, and old age, Krapp becomes increasingly drunk and ridicules the images of himself as a younger man, at one point saying, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.” While Krapp is a thoroughly pathetic character, the scholar Jean-Jacques Mayoux has observed that he is a poignant clown figure complete with “white face and red nose, the ‘rusty black narrow trousers, too short,’ the ‘surprising pair of dirty white boots, size 10 at least, very narrow and pointed,’ with the grotesque near-sighted peerings to match, and the ways of a habitual drunkard.” Indeed, interspersed between snippets of tape and his expostulations of disgust for his younger self, Krapp slips into the clown mode, sticking a banana in his mouth at one point, nearly forgetting that it is there, and later slipping on its peel. Krapp illustrates that near the end of Beckett’s dramatic career, the poet was capable of laughing at humanity despite his awareness of all of its problems.

In 1969 Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for, as the committee wrote, “‘a body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation.’” Scholar Deirdre Bair has remarked that “[t]his comment is probably the most accurate description of Beckett’s writing, as in its succinctness it takes into account his prose, his plays, his achievement, his life.”

Other Works by Samuel Beckett:
- Collected Poems 1930-1978. London: John Calder, 1984.
- The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
- Watt. 1953. Reprint, London: Calder, 1994.

Works about Samuel Beckett:
- Andonian, Cathleen Culotta. Samuel Beckett: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
- Bloom, Harold, ed. Samuel Beckett: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
- Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: HarperCollins, 1996.
- Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. New York: Routledge, 2000.