When Samuel Beckett began his last ‘novel’, Comment c’est, the task of writing proved almost insurmountable and its subject matter the darkest yet. The manuscript was finished in August 1960, and appeared in bookstores by early 1961, followed by the English translation How It Is in 1964. Given the extraordinary scholarly attention Beckett has received since then, matching that of Shakespeare or Joyce, or, indeed, of the most revered canonical authors in any language, it is remarkable that How It Is remains an enigma. Beckett's most difficult and challenging text – arguably his masterpiece – was long ignored and is still only partially understood. This incomprehension owes much to the poetic complexity of Beckett's elliptical, allusive and fragmented prose, but also arises from the lack of a sustained tradition of scholarly exegesis, commentary and analysis. My book addresses this issue.

A critical commonplace maintains that How It Is almost exclusively reflects its procedures of articulation or composition, thereby divorcing the narrative voice from a signifying narrative. My seven chapters are devoted to specific areas within the history of philosophy that have shaped its subject matter. This text is not solely about its process of composition because the act of poetically refiguring inherited narratives enters into a profound dialogue with the very content of those narratives. How It Is remains unrelentingly metatextual, but its writing about writing motivates its hero. Ostensibly an epic quest through a purgatorial underworld of mud, the ‘I’ seeks an answer to his most fundamental epistemological and theological question: ‘me sole elect’ (11). Itself inseparable from a dialectic between author and character, this ‘I’ needs to know if he is alone in the mud. Is his perception of any ‘other’, below or above, illusory, or will he be one of God's chosen, finally reunited with his ‘other above in the light’ (3 passim)? The narrative presents itself as the constantly interrupted repetition of this story, once dictated by an ‘ancient voice’ above to the ‘I’ below, who hears this voice in the narrative present echoing imperfectly within his memory and assumes no agency over it.