In his early critical essay on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett warned that the “danger is in the neatness of identifications.” Any attempt to discuss the literary relationship between the three dominant figures of twentieth century Irish literature must be made with this warning in mind. In this essay I will briefly survey the important relationships between Yeats and Joyce, and later between Joyce and Beckett. In both cases, we are dealing with complex issues of inheritance and resistance, with each writer barely separated from the other by just one generation. The acclaimed older figure was, in both cases, both an enabling and a frustrating presence for the younger. While Joyce emerged forcefully at any early stage from the Yeatsian shadow, the idea, proposed by David Hayman, among others, of Beckett suffering from a Harold Bloom-like anxiety of influence within Joyce's shadow needs to be contested. Beckett did emerge definitively from the shade of the older writer even if continuities can be read in their two large bodies of writing. This continuity however, does not give weight to Barbara Gluck's view of the circuitous route that Beckett took while trying to cut the Joycean umbilical cord: “rejecting Joyce's views and methods, Beckett has,” she says, “paradoxically, reaffirmed them and his writings have become more than ever like those of his friend and fellow author.” Writing of the Trilogy, she claims: “the Joycean echoes, parodies, and reverberations are radically muted and diminished.