Samuel Beckett

I

Introduction

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Irish-born poet, novelist, and foremost dramatist of the theatre of the absurd, who won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature.

II

Early Work

Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin. He attended Protestant schools in Northern Ireland and Dublin before entering Trinity College, Dublin. He also taught in Paris, studied the works of René Descartes, and became friends with James Joyce, assisting him with the final revisions of Finnegans Wake. Beckett’s first published work was an essay on Joyce that appeared in the collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). This was followed by a prize-winning poem, “Whoroscope” (1930), and a critical essay, Proust (1931), which laid the philosophical foundation for his life and literary work. Beckett taught briefly at Trinity College, Dublin, but rejected both Ireland and the academic life in 1932. He travelled in England, France, and Germany until 1937, when he settled permanently in Paris.

A collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and a book of poetry, Echo’s Bones (1935), preceded his first novel, Murphy (1938). The story of its protagonist’s comic yet tragic attempts to escape reality by withdrawing from his body into his mind was a model for what was to come in later works. Beckett explored questions about the human condition in his writing, focusing on humanity’s distress while engaged in the never-ending search for meaning and purpose in life. The randomness of daily life was a theme central to his work and something with which he had first-hand experience. In 1938 he survived a near-fatal stabbing, which occurred while he walked with friends. When Beckett later visited his assailant in prison, he asked him why he had been attacked; the man told Beckett he did not know.

Beckett met his lifelong companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, while recuperating in hospital. They both joined the French Resistance, fleeing from the Nazis in Paris in 1942 for unoccupied southern France, where Beckett ran messages for the Resistance, worked as a farm labourer, and wrote his second novel, Watt (published 1953). This was the last work Beckett wrote in English for many years; instead he started to write in French.

III

Later Work

In Paris after the war, Beckett created four major works: his trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), novels that Beckett considered his greatest achievement; and the play Waiting for Godot (1952), which most critics regard as his masterpiece. In this austere two-act tragicomedy, two tramps, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), suffer cold, hunger, and pain while they wait for the mysterious Godot to appear. They argue, consider leaving each other, and contemplate suicide, but do nothing. They encounter only two passers-by: Pozzo, a rich man, and Lucky, his ill-used servant. When Pozzo commands Lucky to think, he delivers a monologue of jumbled bits and pieces:

This work established Beckett’s reputation as a major exponent of the theatre of the absurd, which uses unconventional forms of character development, dialogue, and setting to portray humanity’s reactions to realities such as time, self, and death in a senseless and purposeless world. Didi sums up life in the following way: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.”

In the novels and plays that followed this work, Beckett continued to focus on the basic anguish of the human condition, which he ultimately reduced to the solitary self, or to nothingness. He also pared language down to its bare bones in a lean, disciplined prose seasoned with sardonic wit and relieved by vaudevillian patter and clowning. His influence on subsequent dramatists, particularly those who followed him in the so-called absurdist tradition, was significant, and the impact of his prose was considerable.

Other major works include the plays Endgame (1957); Krapp’s Last Tape (1958); Happy Days (1961); Play (1964); Not I (1973); Ends and Odds (1976), a collection of eight dramatic works; and Catastrophes et Autres Dramaticulus (1982), composed of five plays; and the prose works How It Is (1964) and Worstward Ho (1984). Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, and his Collected Works were published in 1970. He continued to write almost up to the time of his death, in Paris, in 1989.