The one fundamental behind all Beckett’s works is the ancient tragic knowledge which has been revived by the absurd of man’s Solitude , Imprisonment and Pain in an intolerable universe that is indifferent to this suffering.

One of the most unique and powerful voices of the Twentieth Century, Sameul Beckett was born in Foxrock, Ireland, in 1906, and suffered, as he claimed, an eventless childhood.

Beckett's drama is most closely associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. He employs a minimalistic approach, stripping the stage of unnecessary spectacle and characters. Tragedy and comedy collide in a bleak illustration of the human condition and the absurdity of existence. In this way, each work, from the lengthy productions (Godot, Endgame) to the very brief (Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe) to the despairing mologues (Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue), serves as a metaphor for existence and an entertaining philosophical discussion. Although Beckett dissociated himself from the post World War II French existentialists, his works cover much of the same ground and ask similar questions.

The novels and plays of Samuel Beckett appear to equate life itself with aimless loitering and unending decrepitude. Yet Beckett's own life, as narrated by James Knowlson in this engaging biography, was more adventurous and gregarious than his bleak vision of the human lot might lead one to suspect. For many years Beckett struggled with his depressive temperament. Then, at age 39, he had a revelation in his mother's house in Foxrock, near Dublin, and came to accept "the dark'' in himself as the commanding side of his personality. All of a sudden, Beckett, who had been only sporadically productive until then, turned into a highly energetic, protean artist.

So deep is Samuel Beckett's depression, so great his gloom, that next to him the various absurdists, chroniclers of the dismal, and cosmic comedians seem so many Rotarians. He is the wastelander of all wastelanders.

Dublin had produced a number of expressive playwrights for over three hundred years (R.S. Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, J. B. Shaw, S. O'Casey, J.M. Synge, and others), and so it is no surprise that Samuel Beckett, often considered to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th century at all , had to be born right in this city. It seems that Beckett was destined in terms of his date of birth as well - Good Friday, as a date of Christ's crucifixion, April 13 1906, brought an almost mystical symbolism into his personal life and writings. Christ's death and the attendant theory that one of the two thieves who has to have been crucified with him was saved while the other was damned are the motifs which Beckett used in various forms throughout his writing.

Vladimir:

Ah, yes the two thieves. Do you remember the story?

Estragon:

No.

Vladimir:

Shall I tell it to you?

Estragon:

No.

Vladimir:

It'll pass the time. (Pause) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One-

Estragon:

Our what?

Vladimir:

Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other...(he searches for the contrary of saved)...damned.

(Waiting for Godot)

Beckett as the second son of William Frank Beckett and Mary Roe Beckett, followed his brother to various schools, first in Stillorgan and later in Dublin, where at the age of 17 he entered Trinity College. Beckett was a bright student and moreover an excellent athlete. He won numerous medals and excelled at rugby, cricket, boxing, golf, and tennis. After receiving his B.A. degree from Trinity College, he was awarded the post of lector in Paris where he set off for at the age of 22. The French capital became the strongest factor influencing his style and the spirit of his writings. On his way to France, Beckett travelled first to Germany to visit his father's sister Frances Beckett Sinclair who lived with her husband William and their three children in Kassel. The Sinclairs were artists living sort of bohemian life among their many friends from the art world. Beckett immediately took a fancy to their easy-going life-style. He was also greatly attracted to one of the Sinclairs' daughter Peggy with whom he fell in love. They probably wanted to merry, as Peggy's sister remembers, but the family did not agree, because they were first cousins. Soon after, she went away to music and dancing school to Vienna in Austria and at the age of 18 she contracted tuberculosis and two years later died in Germany. Peggy was Samuel's first love and she is generally believed to be the original for the green-eyed heroines who appear in Beckett's writings.

Krapp's Last Tape :

-upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay on at the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I notice a scratch on her tight and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-(Pause)-after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and struck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. She lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

26 years before Beckett arrived in Paris, James Joyce made the same journey. Samuel, on recommendation of his Irish school mate, the poet Thomas McGreevy, soon met Joyce. He was immediately impressed by Joyce's literary work, that he wrote an essay on him Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce , which was his first published work showing his unbounded admiration for his "artistic father". Because Joyce's eyesight was so bad that he could not see to write, Beckett helped him, and soon began to be known as Joyce's secretary. Two years later, Beckett published an essay on Proust Proust, which is probably why he was often labelled Proustian or Joycean. "As for the influence "itself", Beckett has given what is no doubt the best and fairest assessment of what he owes to Joyce, and how their goals are diametrically different: 'Joyce was a superb manipulator of material-perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn't a syllable that is superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I am not the master of my own material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance. ...My little exploration is the whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - as something by definition incompatible with art'".

In Paris Beckett also started to explore philosophy, he read Arthur Schopenhauer, René Descartes who led him to Arnold Geulincx and occasionalism. Beckett returned to Dublin in 1930, at the age of 24, and was appointed a lector in French at Trinity College. In January after having spent there four terms, Beckett resigned this academic post. In Dublin he suffered from serious depression. He spent all his time in a dark room and missed Paris where he had possessed more personal freedom. On his doctor's recommendation, Beckett left for Germany and after six months he returned back to Paris. He lived in a Paris hotel and realised that he needed to earn money to be able to stay there. As a consequence, he started to write poems, stories, and the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women , which has never been published, but the portions of which he used in the collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks. In 1933 when Hitler took power, Beckett was in Dublin. This was the beginning of very hard period of Beckett's mental breakdown. His great love Peggy died from tuberculoses that year, and soon Beckett's father had a massive heart attack, which totally overwhelmed him. After spending several months in Ireland, Beckett headed for London, where he spent two miserable years, depressed and confused about the quality of his writing, having no idea how great his talent really was. Nevertheless, Beckett began to write furiously, the result of which was the collection of poems Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). In addition, he started to write a novel, for which London became the setting - Murphy (1938). The character of Murphy is very like Beckett himself, it is one of the novels where the the places and the names of the streets are named exactly. There appears Stadium road where Beckett lived at that time, Lots Road, Cremorne Road, and where Beckett as well as Murphy wandered about London, both usually in a very depressed state. Soon after the beginning of the war Beckett returned to Paris to be with his friends. During the war the Gestapo discovered Beckett's activities in connection with the French Resistance movement. As a result, he was forced to find a sanctuary in Roussillon in the apartment of his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil's friend. Here, in the south of France he spent a long period of time during the war years. While hiding from the Nazis, he wrote another novel Watt (1942-1944), which is considered "an important bridge from the pre-war to the post-war writings" and where the basic Beckettean themes as the alienation from the world, appear. After the war he returned back to Ireland again to be with his mother. Mary Roe Beckett was, at that time, dying from Parkinson's disease and throughout her final illness, Beckett cared for her. About his mother's death he later wrote in Krapp's Last Tape:

Krapp's Last Tape :

- bench by the weir from where I could see her window. There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone. (Pause.) ...I was there when (...) the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs, throwing a ball for a little white dog as chance would have it. I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at least. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments. (Pause.) The dog's moments.

In the 1950's Beckett wrote in French three more novels - the trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1949-1951), and L'innommable (1953), which he later translated into English as Molloy, Mallone Dies, and Unnameable. Beckett's novels were of no success among French publishers. Due to Beckett's total resignation, it was Suzanne who took the manuscripts from one publisher to the other, and although she was rejected many times, finally made a contract with Lindon, who published Beckett's works. From writing the novels Beckett turned to writing drama, which gave him the new possibilities for expressing his ideas. In 1972 Beckett confessed how and why he started to write plays: "I turned to writing plays to relieve myself of the awful depression the prose led me into. Life at that time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought the theatre would be a diversion."

Beckett found in theatre a new way of making public his private world and these dramatic writings were the works which made him successful and famous across the world. In 1949 he wrote En attendant Godot in French, which soon made its way across the Atlantic establishing Beckett as the most original and influential dramatist of the century. The first English edition translated by Beckett himself, was published in New York by B. Rossett, and due to it Beckett in his 50es started to become well-known amongst the general public. Waiting for Godot was followed by All That Fall, a radio play broadcast in 1957. That was Beckett's first post-war play written in English, and the beginning of a long and creative relationship with BBC. All That Fall was followed by Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Endgame (1958), Embers (1959), Happy Days (1961), Words and Music (1962), and others. In December 1965 the Swedish Academy announced Samuel Beckett as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Beckett avoided the publicity by travelling to Africa and it was J. Lindon, a French publisher, who accepted the award for "a body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation." Towards the close of his life, Beckett gradually started to lose mobility and it started to be difficult and later absolutely impossible for him to walk. In 1989, six months after the death of Suzanne, Samuel Beckett, on December 12, at the age of 83 went off. Beckett expressed his attitude to his literary writing is in these words: "All this business of a labour to accomplish before I can end the words to say; "a truth to recover in order to say it before I can handle an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten; to perform, before I can be done, done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all in a hope that it will console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as someone on the road moving between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway, all lies, I've nothing to do, say nothing in particular, I have to speak whatever that means."

___

Now Let's have a look at some pages and some excerpts from Waiting for Godot and then go to some critical notes concerning Beckett's moral philosophy and his biography which led to such great works of literature and influenced many writers :

ESTRAGON :

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Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo.

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POZZO :

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EN ATTENDANT GODOT (Waiting for Godot), written in 1949 and published in English in 1954, brought Beckett international fame and established him as one of the leading names of the theater of the absurd. Beckett more or less admitted in a New York Post interview by Jerry Tallmer that the dialogue was based on conversations between Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and himself in Roussillon.

His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone. It was with the amazing success of Waiting for Godot at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, in January 1953, that Beckett's rise to world fame began.

It took Godot two years to find a publisher, and a disastrous Florida debut, before the play found critical acclaim in Paris and eventually fame worldwide

Waiting for Godot is part of the Theater of the Absurd. This implies that it is meant to be irrational. Absurd theater does away with the concepts of drama, chronological plot, logical language, themes, and recognizable settings. There is also a split between the intellect and the body within the work. Thus Vladimir represents the intellect and Estragon the body, both of whom cannot exist without the other.

The plays of the «theatre of the absurd» express a sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition through a series of anti-realistic techniques: plotlessness, unexplained events, undeveloped, puppet-like characters, and unstructured, often non-sensical dialogue whose language resembles that of dreams and nightmares. Never an organized school, the «theatre of the absurd» was a Parisian phenomenon of the 1950's and early 1960's whose most important practitioners were the Irishman Samuel Beckett, writing for the most part in French, the Roumanian Eugène Ionesco, writing in French, and Russian-born Arthur Adamov, also writing in French.

The greatest of the «absurd» plays is Beckett's En attendant Godot (1953) , the signature piece of the movement as well as one of the landmarks of 20th-century literature. Beckett's two tramps waiting endlessly for a savior who never appears, passing the time with jokes and stories, constitute one of the emblematic images of the modern imagination.

The Theatre of the Absurd has been said by Martin Esslin (399-405), Peter Brook (65) and others to be a quest for a way to live in a modem world deprived of generally accepted ultimate values.

Theater of the Absurd is a term used to identify a body of plays written primarily in France from the mid-1940s through the 1950s. These works usually employ illogical situations, unconventional dialogue, and minimal plots to express the apparent absurdity of human existence. French thinkers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre used the term absurd in the 1940s in recognition of their inability to find any rational explanation for human life. The term described what they understood as the fundamentally meaningless situation of humans in a confusing, hostile, and indifferent world.

British scholar Martin Esslin first used the phrase “theater of the absurd” in a 1961 critical study of several contemporary dramatists, including Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett and French playwrights Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. These writers reacted against traditional Western theatrical conventions, rejecting assumptions about logic, characterization, language, and plot. For example, Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1953; translated as Waiting for Godot, 1954) portrays two tramps waiting for a character named Godot. They are not sure who Godot is, whether he will show up to meet them, and indeed whether he actually exists, but they spend each day waiting for him and trying to understand the world in which they live. Beckett often reduced character, plot, and dialogue to a minimum in an effort to highlight fundamental questions of human existence. Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve (1950; The Bald Soprano, 1956) portrays a group of characters who are incapable of true communication and who have no apparent purpose in their lives. The play has a circular structure, ending in the same way that it began.

Precursors to the theater of the absurd can be found in a number of late 19th-century and early 20th-century writers and literary movements. Ubu roi (1896; translated 1951), by French playwright Alfred Jarry, is considered an early example of absurdist theater for its use of nonsense language and mocking of theatrical conventions. The early 20th-century artistic movement known as surrealism sought to employ the subconscious mind by creating works of art spontaneously, without conscious thought; the sometimes bizarre, disjointed, or illogical products of this process resemble absurdist theater. Other theatrical trends and movements that influenced the theater of the absurd or were incorporated into it include vaudeville and slapstick humor and the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. To a lesser extent, absurdist theater was influenced by the theoretical writings of Antonin Artaud in Le théâtre et son double (1938; The Theater and its Double, 1958), which called for a theater that would jolt audiences and thereby stir them to action.

The first absurdist plays shocked audiences at their premieres, but their techniques are now common in avant-garde theater and in some mainstream works. Contemporary playwrights whose work shows the influence of the theater of the absurd include American dramatists Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, British dramatists Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, German dramatists Günter Grass and Peter Weiss, Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, and Czech dramatist Václav Havel.

The drama critic , Martin Esslin , as one who coined the phrase"The Theatre of the_ Absurd " on Beckett and other certain dramatists who were concerned with that strange content , writes :

"The human condition being what it is, with man small, helpless, insecure, and unable ever to fathom the world in all its hopelessness, death, and absurdity, the theatre has to confront him with the bitter truth that most human endeavor is irrational and senseless, that communication between human beings is well-nigh impossible, and that the world will forever remain an impenetrable mystery. At the same time, the recognition of all these bitter truths will have a liberating effect: if we realize the basic absurdity of most of our objectives we are freed from being obsessed with them and this release expresses itself in laughter."

In his essay , The Myth of Sisyphus , Albert Camus considers Sisyphus as the absurd hero and talks about this sense of absurdity which is neither in Sisyphus nor in the world itself , but in the confrontation between these two.

I have chosen some excerpts from his essay which comes below to show why , according to some critics , it has been considered as the manifesto of the absurd :

"A world which can be explained, even through bad reasoning, is a familiar one. On the other hand, in a world suddenly devoid of illusion and light, man feels like a stranger."

In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile. . . . This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.

At dusk two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Didi and Gogo , meet near a bare tree on a country road to wait for the promised arrival of the elusive Godot. They pass the time in a variety of ways: trying to recall their past, quoting from the Bible, discussing the nearby tree, speculating about Godot, telling jokes, recounting dreams, eating, and urinating. Before nightfall, Pozzo, a capricious master, and Lucky, his brutalized servant, appear briefly. Their relationship as master and slave provides a sharp contrast with the friendly equality of the two tramps. Eventually Godot sends word that he will not come that day but will surely come the next. In the second act, the tree has grown four or five leaves, but the state of Gogo and Didi has deteriorated. Their memories are even less dependable, and they find less and less to say. They are more conscious of their activities as pastime, or play. Pozzo and Lucky reappear briefly, the former now blind, the latter dumb. Once more Godot sends word that he cannot come that day. In despair, the tramps make an unsuccessful attempt to hang themselves. Then, as at the end of the first act, they declare their intention of leaving, but they do not move.

When confronted with the devastating results of the Second World War, people were disillusioned with various totalitarian fallacies, the optimism of scientific development, the inevitable upward progress of humankind, and the traditional belief in God's benevolence to the world. They were enveloped by the feelings of despair and strangeness in a world that had once been familiar with them. Their life was "one of constant restlessness and estrangement, indicating the essential disharmony between man and the world he [had to] live in."

According to Sartre, every decision man makes for himself in the face of the irrational world involves the feelings of anxiety and loneliness. If man is fearful about these feelings and fails to create his own destiny, he confines himself to the absurdity of the meaningless world and of the existential predicament. Since man can shape his meaningful life through "nothing else but what he makes of himself," he should get out of the anguished feelings and create his own solutions. By doing so, man can free himself from the feeling of nausea and the prison of absurdity. Sartre regards drama as an effective medium for shaping people's thoughts and develops his existentialist philosophy into a dramatic formula. Sartre contends that the most moving drama presents a situation which forces a character to create himself by making a free choice. The character is "not to be defined as a reasoning animal or a social one, but as a free being, entirely indeterminate, who must choose his own being when confronted with certain necessities." Within the situation of necessities, he is condemned to be free from all outside forces. Other people are only hell for the Sartrean character. He rejects every social, political, and religious authority since it sets limits on his freedom. And the only way the character achieves his freedom is to perform an action that engages his responsibility for mankind as well as for the consequences of what he does. He should be aware that he "chooses for everyone else when he chooses for himself" and that "when he chooses the lot of others he is at the same time choosing his own pattern of behavior." To make clear this moral responsibility, the Sartrean character should show such a vow or a commitment that reveals "a purpose," "a moral life," "a right to perform [his action]."

In Sartre's view, they were overwhelmed by the notion that the world went mad beyond their reason, raised serious questions about existing values and orders that had once sustained their rational understanding of the world, and finally came to think about creating their own set of values to cope with the irrational condition.

Nevertheless, they constantly avoided this creation and relapsed into the routines of everyday life. Sartre then contended that what compelled them to take everyday habits was the fear of the unknown and loneliness which the creation would bring about.

The notion of the absurd world expressed in the works of Sartre and Camus is often shared by such post-World War II playwrights as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. However, while Sartre and Camus are called "existentialist" dramatists, these playwrights are labeled "absurdist" since many of their works are characterized by an illogical form that radically deviates from the structure of traditional drama. Using this new dramatic

form , these absurdist playwrights usually express in their works the negative vision of Sartre and Camus , the idea of man's meaningless life in the irrational world. In Esslin's words, these absurdist playwrights hold in common a sense of "metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition." They all believe that modern man is surrounded by a chaotic universe of shattered beliefs.

The notion of the absurd world expressed in the works of Sartre and Camus is often shared by such post-World War II playwrights as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. However, while Sartre and Camus are called "existentialist" dramatists, these playwrights are labeled "absurdist" since many of their works are characterized by an illogical form that radically deviates from the structure of traditional drama. Using this new dramatic form, these absurdist playwrights usually express in their works the negative vision of Sartre and Camus, the idea of man's meaningless life in the irrational world. In Esslin's words, these absurdist playwrights hold in common a sense of "metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition." They all believe that modern man is surrounded by a chaotic universe of shattered beliefs. This belief has already been shown or strongly implied in the works of Sartre and Camus. However, while Sartre and Camus allow the characters to make their own choice for their life and present a way out of the chaotic human condition, the absurdist playwrights permit the characters no choice and no solution. The absurdist playwrights do not suggest any path beyond the terrifying reality of the absurd world and express in their plays the idea of man's existential disorientation mainly through four leitmotifs: man's uncertain situation in an indifferent world, his futile existence in the routines of daily life, a sense of isolation in his uncertain and mechanical life, and a lack of communication in his isolation.

Beckett's writing reveals his own immense learning. It is full of subtle allusions to a multitude of literary sources as well as to a number of philosophical and theological writers. The dominating influences on Beckett's thought were undoubtedly the Italian poet Dante, the French philosopher René Descartes, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Arnold Geulincx--a pupil of Descartes who dealt with the question of how the physical and the spiritual sides of man interact--and, finally, his fellow Irishman and revered friend, James Joyce. But it is by no means essential for the understanding of Beckett's work that one be aware of all the literary, philosophical, and theological allusions.

The widespread idea, fostered by the popular press, that Beckett's work is concerned primarily with the sordid side of human existence, with tramps and with cripples who inhabit trash cans, is a fundamental misconception. He dealt with human beings in such extreme situations not because he was interested in the sordid and diseased aspects of life but because he concentrated on the essential aspects of human experience. The subject matter of so much of the world's literature--the social relations between individuals, their manners and possessions, their struggles for rank and position, or the conquest of sexual objects--appeared to Beckett as mere external trappings of existence, the accidental and superficial aspects that mask the basic problems and the basic anguish of the human condition. The basic questions for Beckett seemed to be these: How can we come to terms with the fact that, without ever having asked for it, we have been thrown into the world, into being? And who are we; what is the true nature of our self? What does a human being mean when he says "I"?

What appears to the superficial view as a concentration on the sordid thus emerges as an attempt to grapple with the most essential aspects of the human condition. The two heroes of Waiting for Godot, for instance, are frequently referred to by critics as tramps, yet they were never described as such by Beckett. They are merely two human beings in the most basic human situation of being in the world and not knowing what they are there for. Since man is a rational being and cannot imagine that his being thrown into any situation should or could be entirely pointless, the two vaguely assume that their presence in the world, represented by an empty stage with a solitary tree, must be due to the fact that they are waiting for someone. But they have no positive evidence that this person, whom they call Godot, ever made such an appointment--or, indeed, that he actually exists. Their patient and passive waiting is contrasted by Beckett with the mindless and equally purposeless journeyings that fill the existence of a second pair of characters. In most dramatic literature the characters pursue well-defined objectives, seeking power, wealth, marriage with a desirable partner, or something of the sort. Yet, once they have attained these objectives, are they or the audience any nearer answering the basic questions that Beckett poses? Does the hero, having won his lady, really live with her happily ever after? That is apparently why Beckett chose to discard what he regarded as the inessential questions and began where other writing left off.

This stripping of reality to its naked bones is the reason that Beckett's development as a writer was toward an ever greater concentration, sparseness, and brevity. His two earliest works of narrative fiction, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy, abound in descriptive detail. In Watt, the last of Beckett's novels written in English, the milieu is still recognizably Irish, but most of the action takes place in a highly abstract, unreal world. Watt, the hero, takes service with a mysterious employer, Mr. Knott, works for a time for this master without ever meeting him face to face, and then is dismissed. The allegory of man's life in the midst of mystery is plain.

Most of Beckett's plays also take place on a similar level of abstraction. Fin de partie (one-act, 1957; Endgame) describes the dissolution of the relation between a master, Hamm, and his servant, Clov. They inhabit a circular structure with two high windows--perhaps the image of the inside of a human skull. The action might be seen as a symbol of the dissolution of a human personality in the hour of death, the breaking of the bond between the spiritual and the physical sides of man. In Krapp's Last Tape (one-act, first performed 1958), an old man listens to the confessions he recorded in earlier and happier years. This becomes an image of the mystery of the self, for to the old Krapp the voice of the younger Krapp is that of a total stranger. In what sense, then, can the two Krapps be regarded as the same human being? In Happy Days (1961), a woman, literally sinking continually deeper into the ground, nonetheless continues to prattle about the trivialities of life. In other words, perhaps, as one gets nearer and nearer death, one still pretends that life will go on normally forever.

In his trilogy of narrative prose works--they are not, strictly speaking, novels as usually understood--Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, as well as in the collection Stories and Texts for Nothing (1967), Beckett raised the problem of the identity of the human self from, as it were, the inside. This basic problem, simply stated, is that when I say "I am writing," I am talking about myself, one part of me describing what another part of me is doing. I am both the observer and the object I observe. Which of the two is the real "I"? In his prose narratives, Beckett tried to pursue this elusive essence of the self, which, to him, manifested itself as a constant stream of thought and of observations about the self. One's entire existence, one's consciousness of oneself as being in the world, can be seen as a stream of thought. Cogito ergo sum is the starting point of Beckett's favourite philosopher, Descartes: "I think; therefore, I am." To catch the essence of being, therefore, Beckett tried to capture the essence of the stream of consciousness that is one's being. And what he found was a constantly receding chorus of observers, or storytellers, who, immediately on being observed, became, in turn, objects of observation by a new observer. Molloy and Moran, for example, the pursued and the pursuer in the first part of the trilogy, are just such a pair of observer and observed. Malone, in the second part, spends his time while dying in making up stories about people who clearly are aspects of himself. The third part reaches down to bedrock. The voice is that of someone who is unnamable, and it is not clear whether it is a voice that comes from beyond the grave or from a limbo before birth. As we cannot conceive of our consciousness not being there--"I cannot be conscious that I have ceased to exist"--therefore consciousness is at either side open-ended to infinity. This is the subject also of the play Play (first performed 1963), which shows the dying moments of consciousness of three characters, who have been linked in a trivial amorous triangle in life, lingering on into eternity.