The Broken Window : Beckett's Dramatic Perspective

The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatrical perspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of the changes of the definition of twentieth century-knowledge (e.g, art, science, philosophy, and psychology) then discusses the concepts of time, space, and movement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater. The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-century esthetic and philosophical concerns – the impossibility of separating subject and object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movement and change – into specific dramatic techniques and traces their evolution through close textual analyses of six plays. Hale is the first critic to define Beckett’s theatrical techniques in terms of the notion of perspective and to link them to similar innovations in the plastic arts. In addition, no critic has so exhaustively elaborated Beckett’s premises of indeterminacy, the inevitability of perception, and the breakdown of the subject/object relationship.