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20th Century Views
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays
13 critical essays examine and evaluate the work of the provocative contemporary Irish author, Samuel Beckett
182 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1965
About the author
Martin Esslin
45 books31 followersMartin Julius Esslin OBE (6 June 1918 – 24 February 2002) was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name (1961).
Born Julius Pereszlényi (Hungarian: Pereszlényi Gyula Márton) in Budapest, Esslin moved to Vienna with his family at a young age. He studied Philosophy and English at the University of Vienna and also graduated from the Reinhardt Seminar as a producer. Of Jewish descent, he fled Austria in the wake of the Anschluss of 1938.
Esslin defined the 'Theatre of the Absurd' as that which
Esslin's definition encompassed not only Beckett's works but those of Sławomir Mrożek, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Günter Grass and Edward Albee amongst others.
He began working for the BBC in 1940, serving as a producer, script writer and broadcaster. He was head of BBC Radio Drama 1963-77, having previously worked for the external European Service. After leaving the BBC he held senior academic posts at Florida State and Stanford Universities.
He also adapted and translated many works from the original German, for example many plays of Wolfgang Bauer between 1967 and 1990. Original works included the seminal Theatre of the Absurd, and The Field of Drama.
Esslin died in London on February 24, 2002 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Source: Wikipedia
Born Julius Pereszlényi (Hungarian: Pereszlényi Gyula Márton) in Budapest, Esslin moved to Vienna with his family at a young age. He studied Philosophy and English at the University of Vienna and also graduated from the Reinhardt Seminar as a producer. Of Jewish descent, he fled Austria in the wake of the Anschluss of 1938.
Esslin defined the 'Theatre of the Absurd' as that which
"The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought."
Esslin's definition encompassed not only Beckett's works but those of Sławomir Mrożek, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Günter Grass and Edward Albee amongst others.
He began working for the BBC in 1940, serving as a producer, script writer and broadcaster. He was head of BBC Radio Drama 1963-77, having previously worked for the external European Service. After leaving the BBC he held senior academic posts at Florida State and Stanford Universities.
He also adapted and translated many works from the original German, for example many plays of Wolfgang Bauer between 1967 and 1990. Original works included the seminal Theatre of the Absurd, and The Field of Drama.
Esslin died in London on February 24, 2002 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 28, 2026
Introduction:
… we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones., let them. and provide their own aspirin. Hamm, as stated., and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.’
- … Samuel Beckett in one of his letters to Allan Schneider
Beckett reticence is no mere whim. Inevitably there exists an organic connection between his refusal to explain his meaning (‘We’re not beginning to. . . to. . .mean something?’ Asks Hamm in Endgame; and Clov retorts, with a burst of sardonic laughter: ‘Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah that’s a good one!’) in the critics massive urge to supply an explanation.
‘ the individual,’ says Beckett in his essay on Proust, ‘ is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale, and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated, and multicolored by the phenomenon of its hours.’…
Then, thirdly, and above all: if it is indeed true that esse est percipi (and for a writer's being as a writer it is certainly true; for his work exists only in the minds of those who read it; and the writer's activity itself has, from Horace to Proust, been frequently regarded by the writers themselves as an attempt to achieve permanent being beyond physical death, the only eflective way to reach genuine immunity from the obliterating action of time), then it must also be true that a writer's very existence as a writer will depend on the manner in which his work is perceived and experienced by his readers.
Samuel Beckett: Humor and the Void - Maurice Nadeau
Molloy… one person sees it as a masterpiece of humor, another as an epic of disaster. The sum it is silent translated into words, to others no more than a literary exposition of complexes belonging more properly to psychoanalysis. In fact., everyone sees it in what he wants to see, which is proof at once of the books richness and of its ambiguity. People are lost in conjecture as to what the author means, and find it hard to accept that he did didn’t mean anything at all. How could the author of so mysterious a book possibly not #MIN more than he actually says? But what does he say?
The story is presented in two phases, with a break in between that, makes it into two separate stories at once similar and dis similar. The events in the first are repeated in the second at a quicker pace, in more concrete terms, but following the same catastrophic pattern. The main characters in the two parts are not the same person., but they bear such a marked resemblance to each other that they really only differ and identity both end up in a situation from which there is no way out both have assumed the same condition: the condition of inhumanity.
Although, of course, the author’s intention cannot be reduced to such a clear cut proposition, one is immediately struck by the symbol of humanity, falling into the void but this void constitutes man’s surest reality, and is so active as to make the world seem an illusion. Nothing is certain but the void, and error, in the idiotic race which every man seems condemned to Run to no purpose, in which, as in Kafka, suggest some divine malediction.
Failure at the Attempt at De-Mythologization:
Samuel Beckett's Novels
by Dieter Wellershoff
“In Samuel Beckett's novels literature has reached a point at which it is looking over its own shoulders. It hears itself as a voice, endlessly talking, talking in vain, inventing more and more fictions and lies, doubting and abusing itself, disputing its own validity, repetitious, saying less and less and yet continuing to spin words—a voice that is in itself a compulsion to go on talking. Why can't that voice stop? Precisely because that is what it wants once and for all. As an endless discourse about the desire to come to an end, it circles around the secret of its own origin.
It wants to say the last, conclusive word that will leave no more to be said, that word which does not exist and for the sake of which talking exists. It is an infinite circle in which the desperate determination to come to an end is identical with the determination not to give up.
"One must go on, I shall go on," says Beckett, indicating by that very phrase that the goal is unattainable.
Samuel Beckett, or "Presence" in the Theatre
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
“The condition of man, says Heidegger, is to be there. The theatre probably reproduces this situation more naturally than any of the other ways of representing reality. The essential thing about a character in a play is that he is "on the scene": there.
Reflections on Samuel Beckett's Plays
by Eva Metman
“Samuel Beckett, who has gone considerably further than any of his contemporaries. Instead of merely showing human existence in its unadorned nakedness, he strips his figures so thoroughly of all those qualities in which the audience might recognize itself that, to start with, an alienation effect is created that leaves the audience mysti-fied. That is to say, the vacuum between what is shown on the stage and the onlooker has become so unbearable that the latter has no alternative but either to reject and turn away or to be drawn into the enigma of plays in which nothing reminds him of any of his purposes in and reactions to the world around him.
Significantly, all Beckett's novels are mainly monologues, or rather mus-ings, of some solitary person, and from this we may take the hint that the various figures which he puts on the stage are not really persons but figures in the inner world.
Waiting for Godot
It is a play without a woman.
“They live, to a large extent, in a twilight state and though one of them, Vladimir, is more aware than his companion Estragon, inertia prevails throughout. They belong to a category of people well known in Paris as clochards, people who have known better times and have often, as in this case, originally been cultured and educated. They make a point of being rejects of destiny, in love with their own position as outsiders.
“Their incapacity to live or to end life, the opening and concluding theme of the play, is intimately linked with their love of helplessness and of wishdreams which they make no attempt to realize. Altogether their wishdreaming and their playfulness blot out whatever serious moods come over them.
Vladimir. Suppose
“They are full of frustrations and resentments and cling together with a mixture of interdependence and affection, easing their situation by calling each other childish names, Gogo and Didi. In these and other respects they are like an old married couple who always want to separate and
never do so.
“This uninspired symbiosis seems to display a concept of friendship which Beckett attributes to Proust; he "situates friendship somewhere between fatigue and ennui.
“They come from nowhere and are going nowhere and they leave no trace.
“I think we are justified in interpreting Pozzo as a gruesome product of the modern age.
“The relationship of master to serf features prominently in Sartre's writings. He says that the sadist attempts to make the other person totally dependent on him, whereas the masochist sees the basis of his own freedom in the freedom of the other. Each one is object to the other and there is no thou.
“Significantly, in the second act of our play, Pozzo is blind and Lucky dumb this is the only change that takes place in any of the figures. This, however, it seems to me, is not really a change but rather a becoming manifest of what was there before: his inability to meet others.
“Waiting for him has become a habit which Beckett calls a "guarantee of dull inviolability .. ..” an adaptation to the meaninglessness of life. "The periods of transition," he continues, "that separate consecutive adaptations... represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous precarious, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being" (ibid., Metman italics)
“then, suddenly, comes a reference to the feminine. Pozzo, becoming visionary, adds: "They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams one instant. Then it's night once more."
This passage might be called Pozzo's leitmotif. The hopeless vision of life as a brilliant moment between the womb and the tomb is stressed and explained by the words, "one day like any other." If one day is like any other, there is nothing but fruitless repetition and no transition can take place. Pozzo only deteriorates. But, towards the end of the play, Vladimir sinks into a reverie in which Pozzo’s vision re-emerge with important additions
“ the unconsciousnes and ambivalence of Godot, expressed in his promise to rescue the tramps and his preventing them from becoming conscious, demonstrates zactly what Jung speaking about God, formulates in these words: "The fact of God's 'unconscious news' throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins... as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin ..." (Metman italics)
“
This episode may well explain why there is no woman in this play, that is to say no woman on the human level: the mother goddess, who is both the womb and the tomb, envelops all and everything with her dread power. In ancient Egypt this goddess was known as an upper and a lower hemisphere, not only feared but worshipped in her two aspects as Nut and Naunet. Beckett, however, refrains both from differentiation and from valuation.
“Being without Time:
On Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot
by Günther Anders
“The proposition: I remain, therefore I am waiting for something….
“Beckett does not show nihilistic men, but the inability of men to be nihilists…
“Vladimir and Estragon, on the other hand, conclude from the fact of their existence that there must be something for which they are waiting; they are champions of the doctrine that life must have meaning even in a manifestly meaningless situation. To say that they represent "nihilists" is, therefore, not only incorrect, but the exact reverse of what Beckett wants to show. As they do not lose hope, are even incapable of losing hope, they are naive, incurably optimistic ideologists. What Beckett presents is not nihilism, but the inability of man to be a nihilist even in a situation of utter hopelessness.
“ Demonstrations of God's existence "ex absentia"
No. That "Godot" exists and that he is going to come, nothing of all this has been suggested by Beckett with one single word. Although the name "Godot" undoubtedly conceals the English word "God," the play does not deal with Him, but merely with the concept of God. No wonder therefore that God's image is left vague: what God does, so we read in the theological passages of the play, is unknown; from hearsay it appears as though he does nothing at all; and the only information conveyed by his daily messenger boy, brother to Kafka's Barnabas, is that, alas, Godot will not be coming today, but certainly tomorrow-and thus Beckett clearly indicates that it is precisely Godot's non-arrival which keeps them waiting for him, and their faith in him, alive. "Let's go."—"We can't."-
"Why not?"-"We're waiting for Godot."-"Ah."
The similarity to Kafka is unmistakable; it is impossible not to be reminded of the "Message of the Dead King." But whether this is a case of direct literary indebtedness does not matter, for both authors are des en-fants du même siècle, nourished by the same pre-literary source. Whether it is Rilke, or Kafka, or Beckett—their religious experience springs, para-doxically, always from religious frustration, from the fact that they do not experience God, and thus paradoxically from an experience they share with unbelief. In Rilke this experience springs from the inaccessibility of God (the first Duino elegy); in Kafka from inaccessibility in a search (The Castle; in Beckett from inaccessibility in the act of waiting-For all of them the demonstrations of God's existence can be formulated as: "He does not come, therefore He is.
“Beckett's Brinkmanship”
by Ross Chambers
“ so that for them existence is a purgatory-on-earth, a purgatory of exclusion and waiting. They are in a kind of no-man's-land, lyng somewhere, somehow, between their existence in time and their life in eternity, neither the one nor the other, but with characteristics of each. Typically, their lives are over but have not ended, and so neverthe-less are still going interminably on, in which they are like Dante's Belacqua (a figure who constantly haunts Beckett's imagination), who has been condemned, although his life is over, to live it through again in expectation of admission first to purgatory proper (for he is as yet only in ante-purgatory) and thence eventually to paradise itself
“And so Molloy puzzles over the contradiction of his life that is over and yet still going on, and his "successor" Malone lies throughout Malone meurt on the brink of departure, but interminably dreaming through his lifetime again as he awaits release, while the very Malone-like Hamm in Fin de Partie, and his progenitors Nagg and Nell, similarly fill their tedium, albeit fitfully, with fragments of tales and memories of their past live. Memory and literature are the only activities left for such characters in their endless, ambiguous situation, part-way out of their lives, but un-able to escape from them completely, closer to attaining the eternal essence than they have ever been before, but still infinitely distant from it
and so condemned still to endless waiting.
“The characteristic light of these purgatories is crepuscular: it is the gray half-light of the protracted twilight of Northern Europe, the time when the day is over, but having not yet moved fully into night is still going slowly on while holding out constant promise of the still distant nigatall. But it is the light, too, of another no-man's-land, the inter-mediate zone of Murphy's mind, the region of Belacqua blissts through which the light of the topmost zone shades off downward towards black of the bottommost point where one is a "mote in the dark of abso-lute freedom."
… we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones., let them. and provide their own aspirin. Hamm, as stated., and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.’
- … Samuel Beckett in one of his letters to Allan Schneider
Beckett reticence is no mere whim. Inevitably there exists an organic connection between his refusal to explain his meaning (‘We’re not beginning to. . . to. . .mean something?’ Asks Hamm in Endgame; and Clov retorts, with a burst of sardonic laughter: ‘Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah that’s a good one!’) in the critics massive urge to supply an explanation.
‘ the individual,’ says Beckett in his essay on Proust, ‘ is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale, and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated, and multicolored by the phenomenon of its hours.’…
Then, thirdly, and above all: if it is indeed true that esse est percipi (and for a writer's being as a writer it is certainly true; for his work exists only in the minds of those who read it; and the writer's activity itself has, from Horace to Proust, been frequently regarded by the writers themselves as an attempt to achieve permanent being beyond physical death, the only eflective way to reach genuine immunity from the obliterating action of time), then it must also be true that a writer's very existence as a writer will depend on the manner in which his work is perceived and experienced by his readers.
Samuel Beckett: Humor and the Void - Maurice Nadeau
Molloy… one person sees it as a masterpiece of humor, another as an epic of disaster. The sum it is silent translated into words, to others no more than a literary exposition of complexes belonging more properly to psychoanalysis. In fact., everyone sees it in what he wants to see, which is proof at once of the books richness and of its ambiguity. People are lost in conjecture as to what the author means, and find it hard to accept that he did didn’t mean anything at all. How could the author of so mysterious a book possibly not #MIN more than he actually says? But what does he say?
The story is presented in two phases, with a break in between that, makes it into two separate stories at once similar and dis similar. The events in the first are repeated in the second at a quicker pace, in more concrete terms, but following the same catastrophic pattern. The main characters in the two parts are not the same person., but they bear such a marked resemblance to each other that they really only differ and identity both end up in a situation from which there is no way out both have assumed the same condition: the condition of inhumanity.
Although, of course, the author’s intention cannot be reduced to such a clear cut proposition, one is immediately struck by the symbol of humanity, falling into the void but this void constitutes man’s surest reality, and is so active as to make the world seem an illusion. Nothing is certain but the void, and error, in the idiotic race which every man seems condemned to Run to no purpose, in which, as in Kafka, suggest some divine malediction.
Failure at the Attempt at De-Mythologization:
Samuel Beckett's Novels
by Dieter Wellershoff
“In Samuel Beckett's novels literature has reached a point at which it is looking over its own shoulders. It hears itself as a voice, endlessly talking, talking in vain, inventing more and more fictions and lies, doubting and abusing itself, disputing its own validity, repetitious, saying less and less and yet continuing to spin words—a voice that is in itself a compulsion to go on talking. Why can't that voice stop? Precisely because that is what it wants once and for all. As an endless discourse about the desire to come to an end, it circles around the secret of its own origin.
It wants to say the last, conclusive word that will leave no more to be said, that word which does not exist and for the sake of which talking exists. It is an infinite circle in which the desperate determination to come to an end is identical with the determination not to give up.
"One must go on, I shall go on," says Beckett, indicating by that very phrase that the goal is unattainable.
Samuel Beckett, or "Presence" in the Theatre
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
“The condition of man, says Heidegger, is to be there. The theatre probably reproduces this situation more naturally than any of the other ways of representing reality. The essential thing about a character in a play is that he is "on the scene": there.
Reflections on Samuel Beckett's Plays
by Eva Metman
“Samuel Beckett, who has gone considerably further than any of his contemporaries. Instead of merely showing human existence in its unadorned nakedness, he strips his figures so thoroughly of all those qualities in which the audience might recognize itself that, to start with, an alienation effect is created that leaves the audience mysti-fied. That is to say, the vacuum between what is shown on the stage and the onlooker has become so unbearable that the latter has no alternative but either to reject and turn away or to be drawn into the enigma of plays in which nothing reminds him of any of his purposes in and reactions to the world around him.
Significantly, all Beckett's novels are mainly monologues, or rather mus-ings, of some solitary person, and from this we may take the hint that the various figures which he puts on the stage are not really persons but figures in the inner world.
Waiting for Godot
It is a play without a woman.
“They live, to a large extent, in a twilight state and though one of them, Vladimir, is more aware than his companion Estragon, inertia prevails throughout. They belong to a category of people well known in Paris as clochards, people who have known better times and have often, as in this case, originally been cultured and educated. They make a point of being rejects of destiny, in love with their own position as outsiders.
“Their incapacity to live or to end life, the opening and concluding theme of the play, is intimately linked with their love of helplessness and of wishdreams which they make no attempt to realize. Altogether their wishdreaming and their playfulness blot out whatever serious moods come over them.
Vladimir. Suppose
“They are full of frustrations and resentments and cling together with a mixture of interdependence and affection, easing their situation by calling each other childish names, Gogo and Didi. In these and other respects they are like an old married couple who always want to separate and
never do so.
“This uninspired symbiosis seems to display a concept of friendship which Beckett attributes to Proust; he "situates friendship somewhere between fatigue and ennui.
“They come from nowhere and are going nowhere and they leave no trace.
“I think we are justified in interpreting Pozzo as a gruesome product of the modern age.
“The relationship of master to serf features prominently in Sartre's writings. He says that the sadist attempts to make the other person totally dependent on him, whereas the masochist sees the basis of his own freedom in the freedom of the other. Each one is object to the other and there is no thou.
“Significantly, in the second act of our play, Pozzo is blind and Lucky dumb this is the only change that takes place in any of the figures. This, however, it seems to me, is not really a change but rather a becoming manifest of what was there before: his inability to meet others.
“Waiting for him has become a habit which Beckett calls a "guarantee of dull inviolability .. ..” an adaptation to the meaninglessness of life. "The periods of transition," he continues, "that separate consecutive adaptations... represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous precarious, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being" (ibid., Metman italics)
“then, suddenly, comes a reference to the feminine. Pozzo, becoming visionary, adds: "They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams one instant. Then it's night once more."
This passage might be called Pozzo's leitmotif. The hopeless vision of life as a brilliant moment between the womb and the tomb is stressed and explained by the words, "one day like any other." If one day is like any other, there is nothing but fruitless repetition and no transition can take place. Pozzo only deteriorates. But, towards the end of the play, Vladimir sinks into a reverie in which Pozzo’s vision re-emerge with important additions
“ the unconsciousnes and ambivalence of Godot, expressed in his promise to rescue the tramps and his preventing them from becoming conscious, demonstrates zactly what Jung speaking about God, formulates in these words: "The fact of God's 'unconscious news' throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins... as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin ..." (Metman italics)
“
This episode may well explain why there is no woman in this play, that is to say no woman on the human level: the mother goddess, who is both the womb and the tomb, envelops all and everything with her dread power. In ancient Egypt this goddess was known as an upper and a lower hemisphere, not only feared but worshipped in her two aspects as Nut and Naunet. Beckett, however, refrains both from differentiation and from valuation.
“Being without Time:
On Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot
by Günther Anders
“The proposition: I remain, therefore I am waiting for something….
“Beckett does not show nihilistic men, but the inability of men to be nihilists…
“Vladimir and Estragon, on the other hand, conclude from the fact of their existence that there must be something for which they are waiting; they are champions of the doctrine that life must have meaning even in a manifestly meaningless situation. To say that they represent "nihilists" is, therefore, not only incorrect, but the exact reverse of what Beckett wants to show. As they do not lose hope, are even incapable of losing hope, they are naive, incurably optimistic ideologists. What Beckett presents is not nihilism, but the inability of man to be a nihilist even in a situation of utter hopelessness.
“ Demonstrations of God's existence "ex absentia"
No. That "Godot" exists and that he is going to come, nothing of all this has been suggested by Beckett with one single word. Although the name "Godot" undoubtedly conceals the English word "God," the play does not deal with Him, but merely with the concept of God. No wonder therefore that God's image is left vague: what God does, so we read in the theological passages of the play, is unknown; from hearsay it appears as though he does nothing at all; and the only information conveyed by his daily messenger boy, brother to Kafka's Barnabas, is that, alas, Godot will not be coming today, but certainly tomorrow-and thus Beckett clearly indicates that it is precisely Godot's non-arrival which keeps them waiting for him, and their faith in him, alive. "Let's go."—"We can't."-
"Why not?"-"We're waiting for Godot."-"Ah."
The similarity to Kafka is unmistakable; it is impossible not to be reminded of the "Message of the Dead King." But whether this is a case of direct literary indebtedness does not matter, for both authors are des en-fants du même siècle, nourished by the same pre-literary source. Whether it is Rilke, or Kafka, or Beckett—their religious experience springs, para-doxically, always from religious frustration, from the fact that they do not experience God, and thus paradoxically from an experience they share with unbelief. In Rilke this experience springs from the inaccessibility of God (the first Duino elegy); in Kafka from inaccessibility in a search (The Castle; in Beckett from inaccessibility in the act of waiting-For all of them the demonstrations of God's existence can be formulated as: "He does not come, therefore He is.
“Beckett's Brinkmanship”
by Ross Chambers
“ so that for them existence is a purgatory-on-earth, a purgatory of exclusion and waiting. They are in a kind of no-man's-land, lyng somewhere, somehow, between their existence in time and their life in eternity, neither the one nor the other, but with characteristics of each. Typically, their lives are over but have not ended, and so neverthe-less are still going interminably on, in which they are like Dante's Belacqua (a figure who constantly haunts Beckett's imagination), who has been condemned, although his life is over, to live it through again in expectation of admission first to purgatory proper (for he is as yet only in ante-purgatory) and thence eventually to paradise itself
“And so Molloy puzzles over the contradiction of his life that is over and yet still going on, and his "successor" Malone lies throughout Malone meurt on the brink of departure, but interminably dreaming through his lifetime again as he awaits release, while the very Malone-like Hamm in Fin de Partie, and his progenitors Nagg and Nell, similarly fill their tedium, albeit fitfully, with fragments of tales and memories of their past live. Memory and literature are the only activities left for such characters in their endless, ambiguous situation, part-way out of their lives, but un-able to escape from them completely, closer to attaining the eternal essence than they have ever been before, but still infinitely distant from it
and so condemned still to endless waiting.
“The characteristic light of these purgatories is crepuscular: it is the gray half-light of the protracted twilight of Northern Europe, the time when the day is over, but having not yet moved fully into night is still going slowly on while holding out constant promise of the still distant nigatall. But it is the light, too, of another no-man's-land, the inter-mediate zone of Murphy's mind, the region of Belacqua blissts through which the light of the topmost zone shades off downward towards black of the bottommost point where one is a "mote in the dark of abso-lute freedom."
Want to Read
January 30, 2015Should contain:
Three dialogues / Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit --
The private pain and the whey of words : a survey of Beckett's verse / John Fletcher --
Samuel Beckett : humor and the void / Maurice Nadeau --
The Beckett hero / A.J. Leventhal --
The Cartesian centaur / Hugh Kenner --
Watt / Jacqueline Hoefer --
Samuel Beckett and universal parody / Jean-Jacques Mayoux --
Failure of an attempt at de-mythologization : Samuel Beckett's novels / Dieter Wellershoff --
Samuel Beckett, or 'presence' in the theatre / Alain Robbe-Grillet --
Reflections on Samuel Beckett's plays / Eva Metman --
Being without time : on Beckett's play Waiting for Godot / Gunther Anders --
Beckett's brinkmanship / Ross Chambers --
Philosophical fragments in the works of Samuel Beckett / Ruby Cohn
Three dialogues / Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit --
The private pain and the whey of words : a survey of Beckett's verse / John Fletcher --
Samuel Beckett : humor and the void / Maurice Nadeau --
The Beckett hero / A.J. Leventhal --
The Cartesian centaur / Hugh Kenner --
Watt / Jacqueline Hoefer --
Samuel Beckett and universal parody / Jean-Jacques Mayoux --
Failure of an attempt at de-mythologization : Samuel Beckett's novels / Dieter Wellershoff --
Samuel Beckett, or 'presence' in the theatre / Alain Robbe-Grillet --
Reflections on Samuel Beckett's plays / Eva Metman --
Being without time : on Beckett's play Waiting for Godot / Gunther Anders --
Beckett's brinkmanship / Ross Chambers --
Philosophical fragments in the works of Samuel Beckett / Ruby Cohn
Read
November 26, 2016This is a brilliant collection of essays. Each is written from the point of view of a uniquely profound and wide reader -- as evinced by their essays. A good handful of Beckett's works are critically analyzed and viewed through the various lenses of Jung, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Hegel, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Plato, Proust, Descartes, and even Beckett himself -- amongst others. There isn't a dull essay in the collection, though I didn't always agree with the analysis or interpretation. The various perspectives alone make it worth the read.
June 1, 2008
I didn't read the entire text, just the essays on Watt and Waiting for Godot. A very interesting essay on Godot, I especially enjoyed the analysis of Pozzo and Lucky. The Watt essay, much like it's subject, was less elucidating but still useful.
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