Understanding Samuel Beckett

Understanding Samuel Beckett presents an overview of the work of the Irish author whose most famous novels and plays―Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame―are discussed in depth, alongside some less known earlier texts and later, shorter pieces. Alan Astro pays particular attention to Beckett's relationship with other authors (Dante, Joyce, Proust), his debt to philosophers (Sartre, Descartes, Pascal), his bilingualism, the psychoanalytic texture of his writing, and his manipulation of the first-person pronoun. Readers will see how Beckett's characters who wish to narrate their own deaths incorporate silence into their speech. Astro concludes with a discussion of Stirrings Still, Beckett's last text, in which he evokes his own impending demise.