Beckett, Samuel
Beckett, Samuel (1900–89). Irish novelist and playwright, whose Waiting for Godot (1952) was to the 1950s what The Waste Land was to the 1920s. A play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’, it was followed by others paring away character and action in a reductio ad absurdum raised to the level of metaphysical inquiry. Not I (1972) lasts only fifteen minutes and all we see is a shadowy auditor and a woman's mouth from which words stream, expressing, in Beckett's words, ‘that there is nothing to express … together with the obligation to express’. From 1937 settled in Paris and writing in French, his affinities were with Sartre and Heidegger, though an earlier Cartesian dualism often shaped his work. As a story-teller and novelist he was indebted to James Joyce, and his trilogy, completed in 1953 with The Unnameable, though not for the faint-hearted, is redeemed by touches of the master's sly humour.
John Saunders
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Beckett, Samuel
