User:Saposcat/Beckett

Middle period
After World War II, Beckett's work underwent two great changes that were, in fact, intimately connected with one another: first, he made the decision to write primarily in French rather than English; second, his style became much less erudite and, to an extent, more spare and lean.

His first works in this new style were the French short stories "L'expulsé" ("The Expelled"), "Le calmant" ("The Calmative") and "La fin" ("The End"). It is in these stories that Beckett's signature tramp character first appears.


 * Mercier & Camier and Three Stories
 * Trilogy
 * Texts for Nothing
 * How It Is


 * Godot
 * Endgame
 * Krapp's Last Tape
 * Happy Days
 * Play

In the novels, the reader can trace the development of Beckett's mature style and themes. Molloy has many of the characteristics of a conventional novel—time, place, movement and plot—and is indeed, on one level, a detective novel. In Malone Dies, movement and plot are largely dispensed with, but there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable, all sense of place and time have also disappeared, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing and its almost equally strong urge to find silence and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this a reflection of Beckett's experience and understanding of what the war had done to the world. Despite the widely-held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end, as per the final phrase of The Unnamable: 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.

Generally speaking, the plays of this period reflect themes similar to those of the novels, viz despair and the will to survive in the face of an uncomprehending world. In all the works of this period, it is also possible to see the working out of Beckett's faith in writing as a process of self-relevation and of dealing with the space between the self and the world of objects. In most, if not all, of these writings, there is also a very prominent comedic element in the handling of the themes.

In 1961, he published one of his most radical prose works, Comment c'est (How It Is, 1964). This work, written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese, relating the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud with a sack of canned food, is generally considered to mark the end of Beckett's middle period as a writer.


 * subsequent to "revelation" discovers voice as writer, etc.
 * brief description of style & themes, etc.
 * period of full-length works
 * Eleutheria; Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Happy Days; Play
 * Mercier and Camier; stories; trilogy; texts; How It Is

Late works
There followed a series of short minimalist plays and prose works exploring themes of the self confined and observed. Beckett came to focus more clearly on his long-standing opposition to the tyranny of realism in art and of what he viewed as the dictatorship of social norms and expectations. In the 1982 play Catastrophe, dedicated to Václav Havel, he turned his attention to harder forms of dictatorship. In the last ten years of his life, this minimalist style resulted in three of Beckett's most important prose works, the three novellas Company (1979), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho (1984).