Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett an Irish novelist, playwright and poet (1906-1989), writing in both English and French, whose spare and radical works stripped the theatre of plot and decoration and made him one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 for a body of work that, in the words of the citation, rises from destitution to a height of compassion.

Early Life and Formation

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Dublin in April 1906 into a middle-class Protestant family, and he was educated at Portora Royal School and at Trinity College Dublin, where he distinguished himself in modern languages. He was a gifted athlete as well as a scholar, and his early life gave little sign of the ascetic and experimental art he would later produce. He graduated in 1927 and then taught briefly in Belfast.

In 1928 he went to Paris as a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, and there he met James Joyce, whose assistant, friend and admirer he became. The association with Joyce, and the example of his uncompromising devotion to art, had a decisive effect on the young Beckett. He contributed to the defence of Joyce's work and took part in the Parisian literary world of the late 1920s.

He returned to Dublin in 1930 to teach at Trinity College but found academic life uncongenial, and after a period of restlessness he settled permanently in Paris in 1937. During the Second World War he joined the French Resistance, and after its discovery he fled to the unoccupied south, where he worked as a labourer and continued to write. For his wartime service he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Novels and the Turn to French

Beckett's early fiction was written in English and bore the mark of his reading in Joyce and in the European philosophical tradition. More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of stories, and the novel Murphy (1938) introduced the comic and erudite voice that would mature in later work. Murphy, with its hapless hero who wishes to withdraw from the world, already sounded the note of detachment and failure that runs through all his writing.

After the war he began to write in French, a decision that he explained as a way of achieving the austerity he wanted, since the discipline of a foreign language discouraged ornament. The trilogy of novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) is the summit of his fiction, a sequence in which narrative dissolves and the narrating voice becomes the only remaining subject.

In these novels the conventions of character, plot and place fall away, and what remains is a voice speaking to itself, uncertain of its own identity and unable to stop. The prose moves between the comic and the desolate, and it seeks, in Beckett's phrase, a form that accommodates the mess. They established him as one of the most original prose writers of the century.

Waiting for Godot and the Plays

Waiting for Godot, written in French and first performed in Paris in 1953, made Beckett famous. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a tree for a figure named Godot who never arrives, and their waiting, their quarrels and their games fill the two acts, which resemble one another almost exactly. The play dispenses with plot, development and explanation, and yet achieves a theatrical power that has proved inexhaustible.

The following plays continued the reduction of the stage to its essentials. Endgame (1957) places its four characters in a bare room at the end of the world, and its language moves between comic routine and an awareness of doom. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) reduces the drama to a single man listening to recordings of his younger self, and Happy Days (1961) buries its heroine up to her waist and then her neck while she chatters about the trivia of existence.

The later plays grew shorter and more concentrated, until the dramatic action is reduced to a breath, a cry or a single image. Not I, Play, Breath and Rockaby belong to this late phase, in which Beckett stripped away everything that the stage could spare. These works, difficult and brief, are among the purest products of his relentless search for the minimum of expression.

Themes and Technique

The themes that obsess Beckett recur throughout his work: time and memory, the failure of communication, the illusions of habit, the absurdity of expectation, and the persistence of life in the face of meaninglessness. He wrote of the futility of action while making the act of waiting or speaking into something like a heroic necessity. His characters endure, and their endurance is offered without consolation.

His technique is one of reduction and rhythm. He removes the props of realism and concentrates attention on the cadence of speech and the geometry of stage movement, and his dialogue, with its repetitions and its echoing of music-hall patter, has a formal beauty that survives translation. He was a precise and demanding director of his own plays and wrote detailed stage directions for them.

He was reluctant to explain his work or to allow it to be read as a message. He refused interpretations that reduced his plays to philosophy or to pessimism, insisting on their concrete theatrical reality. This reticence, together with the integrity of the work, gave him an authority among writers and directors that few modern authors have enjoyed.

Influence and Legacy

Beckett's influence on the theatre has been immense. Waiting for Godot changed the possibilities of the stage by demonstrating that drama could hold an audience without story or resolution, and the theatre of the absurd, the work of Pinter and of many later playwrights, developed in its shadow. His formal experiments opened the way for a drama of image and rhythm rather than of plot.

He has also been influential as a prose writer. His trilogy and the later short fictions reshaped the novel by pushing narrative toward its limits, and writers in many languages have learned from his economy and his refusal of the easy effect. His bilingual practice, writing in French and translating himself into English, made him a model of the writer as craftsman rather than as national spokesman.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, though he did not attend the ceremony. He died in Paris in December 1989 and is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His grave has become a place of pilgrimage, and his plays remain a permanent part of the repertoire of the serious theatre. He is remembered as the writer who gave the twentieth century its most complete dramatic image of waiting.

See also

• Theatre of the absurd
• Waiting for Godot
• Modernism
• James Joyce