More Pricks than Kicks

More Pricks than Kicks, a collection of ten short stories, was Beckett's first book-length publication of fiction. The title combines a biblical allusion (‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks’, Acts 26: 14) with an obscene pun. Like so much of Beckett's work, the collection is rich in biblical and religious allusion. Since much of the collection is given over to its hero's encounters with women, the sexual overture is appropriate. This mixture of the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the bodily, is a common motif throughout the collection. These ten short stories feature Belacqua Shuah, a down-at-heel Trinity College student in his various misadventures around Dublin. Belacqua is named after a character in Dante's Purgatorio IV, who is detained in ante-purgatory for the sins of indolence and sloth, characteristics not entirely alien to the late-rising young Beckett. ‘Shuah’ is the mother of Onan (Genesis 38: 7–9) whose name gives us ‘Onanism’ or masturbation. The collection opens with the hero musing over a passage from The Divine Comedy. Throughout the stories there is a strong concentration on the topographical details of Dublin city and its environs.

Much of the material, such as the stories ‘A Wet Night’ and ‘The Smeraldina's Billet-Doux’, was salvaged from his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, unpublished during Beckett's own lifetime.