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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Although much comment on Beckett’s prose from How It Is (1961) through The Lost Ones (1970) has appeared, uncertainty as to the artistic intent of this innovative fiction has hindered definitive analysis. An understanding of the pieces as further developments of the Beckettian hero’s progressive withdrawal from an absurd macrocosm and descent toward the ever-receding core of the microcosmic self not only defines meaning in each piece but also reveals a thematic unity binding these works together and to the earlier fiction. Trapped in the mind but unable to escape a suffering awareness of the outer world, the figures portrayed undergo Beckett’s own particular brand of crucifying self-perception.
1 The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971 ), p. 219. For further analysis of Beckett's “silence,” see Hassan's The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf, 1968).
2 “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum, No. 4 (Summer 1961), p. 23.
3 Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 265–66.
4 “Samuel Beckett's Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition,” Computers and the Humanities, 7 (1973), 195–98.
5 A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Farrar, 1973), p. 183.
6 “Some Ping Understood,” Encounter, No. 30 (Feb. 1968), pp. 86, 89, rpt. in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 172–83.
7 “The New Literature, trans. Samuel I. Stone (New York: Braziller, 1959), p. 88.
8 Proust (New York: Grove, 1931), pp. 59–60.
9 All references to works of fiction or drama by Beckett, except for Lessness, are to editions published by Grove Press, New York. References to Lessness are to the Calder and Boyars edition, London. Specific references to these works are designated by page numbers in the text.
10 Although in his earliest fiction Beckett allows two of his heroes—Belacqua and Murphy—the release of physical death, such release is not even a possibility in his work as a whole. Damned (like Swift's Struld-brugs) to an unending existence, the hero suffers from life, a suffering that includes but is not limited to the fact of death as something both dreaded and longed for.
11 John J. Mood (‘“Silence Within’: A Study of the Residua of Samuel Beckett,” Studies in Short Fiction, 7, 1970, 385, 391) elaborates on this correspondence in How It Is and Imagination Dead Imagine, citing a comparison with Malone Dies.
12 “ ‘How It Is’: With Beckett's Fiction,” French Review, 38 (1965), 461.
13 Samuel Beckett Talks about Beckett,“ Vogue, Dec. 1969, p. 210.
14 Beckett informed Brian Finney of the relationship between these two works. See ‘Since How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972), p. 11.
15 “Samuel Beckett's Irreducible,” Southern Review: An Australian Journal of Literary Studies, 6 (1973), 216–17.
16 I have argued (see “The Empty Heaven of Samuel Beckett,” Cithara: Essays in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition, May 1976, pp. 3–19) that, although the Becket-tian hero cannot be said to be searching for God (God cannot even be defined in Beckett's world because of the linguistically irrational nature of such a task), his quest is for something that can be described adequately only within the framework of ideas we have about God. Thus the metaphysical void, in Beckett's macrocosm and microcosm both, could be filled only by a God because it is God-shaped.
17 For speculation on these questions, see “Some Ping Understand,” p. 88, and “‘Silence Within’: A Study of the Residua of Samuel Beckett,” p. 397.
18 For a detailed comparison of Dostoevsky's Christ with Beckett's, see Frederick J. Hoffman, The Language of Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 26–28, 39–40, 54–55.
19 Mood's comment that the later works reduce consciousness “to the point where one is uncertain if even a mental world still exists” (“Silence Within': A Study of the Residua of Samuel Beckett,” pp. 400–01) is misleading.
20 Finney's suggestion (see “A Reading of Beckett's Imagination Dead Imagine,” Twentieth Century Literature, 17, 1971, 69, and ‘Since How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction, pp. 19–21) that darkness represents oblivion or death is confusing, as is his equating of light with consciousness.
21 “Samuel Beckett Talks about Beckett,” p. 210.
22 Federman and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett; His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), pp. 325–41.
23 Imagination Dead Imagine (1965; rpt. London: Calder & Boyars, 1971).
24 Back to Beckett, pp. 252–53; “Some Ping Understood,” pp. 88–89; and ‘Since How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction, p. 23.
25 “A Reading of Beckett's Imagination Dead Imagine,” pp. 70–71, and ‘Since How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction, pp. 26–27.
26 These terms—“boredom of living” and “suffering of being”—are used by Beckett in Proust, p. 8.
27 This representation answers the questions (raised in “Some Ping Understood,” pp. 86, 89) concerning the meaning of blue and white and of nature in Ping.
28 “The Impossibility of Saying the Same Old Thing the Same Old Way—Samuel Beckett's Fiction since Comment c'est,” L'Esprit Créateur, 11 (1971), 34.
29 “‘Silence Within’: A Study of the Residua of Samuel Beckett,” p. 390.
30 Alîghîeri Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans, and ed. Thomas G. Bergin (New York: Appleton, 1955), p. 122 of Inferno.