Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
8 - Dead heads
damnation-narration in the ‘dramaticules’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
E un ch’avea perduti ambo li orecchi per la freddura, pur col viso in giùe disse ‘Perché cotanto in noi ti specchi? ’
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIIIBECKETT’S ‘DRAMATICULES’: THE DYING AND THE GOING
When, in 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Samuel Beckett to write him a play about death, he would appear to have been guilty of a fortunate tautology. Fortunate, because the playwright's generous response to the request was the beautiful miniature A piece of monologue (1979), whose opening is surely his most chillingly paradoxical statement of the chosen theme: 'Birth was the death of him' (CSPL, 265). But a tautology nonetheless, at least according to the play's protagonist, Speaker, who - as if in reply to the actor - denies that any other topic is even thinkable, or speakable: 'Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going.' Or to put it another way, to ask Beckett for a play on death was like asking, say, Petrarch for a sonnet on love: as if he might have written one that was not. All of Beckett's drama, especially his later drama, insofar as it is 'about' anything, is essentially 'about death'.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Beckett , pp. 145 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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