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SAMUEL BECKETT
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. Introduction: Beckett and the Twentieth Century
CHAPTER II. Early Writings: The First Statements of Beckett’s Themes
CHAPTER III. Murphy
CHAPTER IV. Watt and the Transition to the Trilogy
CHAPTER V. The Structure of the Trilogy
CHAPTER VI. Disillusionment with Knowledge and Action
CHAPTER VII. Longing for Silence
CHAPTER VIII. Inferno
CHAPTER IX. Beyond the Trilogy
CHAPTER X. Postscript: Beckett’s Fiction since 1964
NOTES. PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X: Postscript
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Principal Published Works of Samuel Beckett in Chronological Order
Selected Criticism
Biographical Material, Interviews, and Impressions of Beckett as a Person
INDEX
SAMUEL BECKETT: A STUDY OF HIS NOVELS
A Study of His Novels
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As was mentioned earlier, Beckett’s Belacqua, like Dante’s, is ‘sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence’ (p. 44). Like Beckett, too, perhaps: Peggy Guggenheim called Beckett ‘Oblomov’ after the indolent protagonist of Goncharov’s novel, and she says that when she had him read the book he too saw the resemblance between himself and the Russian writer’s inactive hero.9 If Beckett was painting a self-portrait in Belacqua, or a portrait of certain aspects of himself, it was not, however, a self-indulgent portrait. The narrator’s attitude toward Belacqua is actually, as will appear in the discussion that follows, very critical.
Belacqua is indeed indolent. He claims to be an author, but he has never published anything. He spends most of his life just wandering around avoiding work and any entanglements with other people that would demand much expenditure of energy on his part. He is completely self-centred. In the first story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ his principal preoccupation is his lunch, which can be enjoyed only in complete privacy. Although he thinks occasionally about a murderer named McCabe, who is to be hanged, the pity he likes to think he feels is really very superficial. He spreads out the newspaper with McCabe’s face staring up at him, and proceeds to prepare on it his all-important sandwich. ‘The crumbs,’ says the narrator, ‘as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away’ (p. 4). In ‘Ding Dong,’ while out for a walk, he sees a little girl run down by a car, but is completely indifferent; he just walks right on by.
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