Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable spurns both tragedy’s undeserved pains and the counter-tragic theology and philosophies (Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism) that aim to rationalize or overcome pain. Beckett’s character tries and fails to negate his humanity, imagining devolution to insentience. This chapter challenges Beckett scholarship that understands the Unnamable to be in search of mystical wordlessness and self-dissolution. Against the grain, it contends that the more Beckett’s narrator wages war on embodiment and language, the more he severs himself from all attachment to the world. His strategies, I suggest, might kindle the opposite desire in readers. This chapter proceeds to argue that Beckett rewrites this nihilistic character in Company, revisiting his tactics but supplying an alternative to them. Company’s narrator admits the attraction of a suicidal narrative strategy yet opts to resuscitate bonds with others by way of lyrical moments of memory.

Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of re-making himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright, to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of the Second World War, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt, and En attendant Godot between Malone meurt and L'Innommable. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired attention he had struggled so hard to achieve barbed with threats to his art (and even perhaps to his self-image). Enthusiastic about his anti-boulevard play, Eleutheria, and eager for its publication and performance, for example, he would finally repudiate it, withdrawing it from publication after the staging of Godot, finding it in later years impossible either to revise or to translate even for his long-time publisher, Barney Rosset, refusing again to have it published, at least in his lifetime, and finally, if fundamentally by proxy, prohibiting any staging, apparently in perpetuity. It was, however, a play central to Beckett's theatrical reinvention as it, almost literally, swept the stage clear of both boulevard and naturalistic debris and so bared the stage for what would become, in English, Waiting for Godot.

Samuel Beckett's resistance to productions of his plays which depart from the precise stage directions indicated in the texts has attracted public and critical attention through a number of legal disputes between Beckett and a director or company who has flouted the author's directions.The best documented of these is Jo Anne Akalaitis' production of Endgame in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1984, for the American Repertory Theater. The dispute was settled out of court, but both sides presented their case in statements to the audience. Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theatre argued that

Beckett studies, despite a phenomenal growth over the last three decades or so, has only just begun to articulate clearly and fully the essential 'differences' - in the traditional as well as more specialized meanings of the word - with which it is engaged, particularly with reference to the vexed but fundamental question of Beckett's relationship to the philosophers. Is Descartes, with or without the Baroque Rationalism of the Occasionalists Geulincx and Malebranche, critical in dealing with this issue, as the early period of criticism in English affirmed? Or is the 'Cartesian' question basically irrelevant, as is implied by those who chose to focus on Logical Positivism or Existentialism? Or are both of these approaches hopelessly passé in the context of Post-Structuralist critical theory? The whole question of Beckett's relationship to the philosophers is pretty obviously in need of a major critical reassessment.

It is no small irony that for a writer so punctilious about his texts – almost notoriously so for their performance – Samuel Beckett's work has been subject to so much inept editing and so many publication blunders that he could lament to his official biographer, James Knowlson, ‘my texts are in a terrible mess’. The innumerable printing errors introduced into early editions of his work (the edition of Watt published jointly by Collection Merlin and Olympia Press in 1953 and reprinted then both by John Calder in the UK and Grove Press in the US being perhaps the most egregious) have still never been fully corrected, although some progress has been made with recent editions (Grove Press, 2006; Faber & Faber 2011). On 13 August 1992, John Banville, then Literary Editor of the Irish Times, could lament in an essay for the New York Review of Books, ‘It is time now for all of Beckett's works […] to be properly edited and published in definitive and accurate editions in order that future readers be allowed to see them for the unique testaments that they are’ (20, emphasis added). One could hardly agree more – but Banville's call for something like textual purity may simply be a longing for a ‘paradise lost’, since textual problems are more easily recognised and ridiculed than remedied.

A spate of letters to the Times Literary Supplement as Dream of Fair to Middling Women was published is a case in point. What should have been a cause for celebration, the appearance of Samuel Beckett's long-suppressed first novel of 1932, has instead fuelled a textual controversy and led to a clash of egos. Although Beckett wrote only one Dream of Fair to Middling Women, two separate and competing editions of it, with more than a few typographical differences between them, remain in print. In his letter to the Times Literary Supplement on 16 July 1993, Eoin O'Brien, co-editor of Dream, dissociated himself from the second edition, although he remains listed as its editor: ‘Both the US (Arcade) and UK (Calder) 1993 editions of this work have been printed without taking into account the necessary corrections I, and my co-editor, Edith Fournier, made to the proofs of the re-set text.’

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906–89) was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, Ireland. Son of middle-class Protestant parents, Beckett attended Portora Royal School (where Oscar Wilde also went) and then Trinity College Dublin. After graduating, Beckett took lecturer posts at École Normale Supérieure and then back at Trinity College Dublin. Giving up his career in academia, and after being a part of the French Resistance in WWII, Beckett spent most of his adult life in Paris writing plays, short stories, novels, essays, and poetry. Best known for his play, Waiting for Godot, Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Samuel Beckett died in 1989.

One of the primary challenges in discussing a writer in relation to the absurd, as mentioned earlier, is that these writers associated with the absurd were not a part of a self-proclaimed movement; rather, the “movement” was thrust upon them as a somewhat after-the-fact categorization. The analysis of Samuel Beckett's work maybe most clearly typifies this conundrum for both the scholar and the student. Samuel Beckett is one of the most written about authors of the twentieth century. And while Beckett has been the poster boy of absurdism, and in some ways defines how the general public and academics alike understand absurdism, it must be stressed (and this cannot be overstated) that Beckett should not be (and is not) understood only through the lens of the absurd. The absurd is a catchall concept that functions almost as mental shorthand for connecting writers who, while doing some similar things, are also each creating their own literary paths. Therefore, it is vital to understand how Beckett does not just fit in with other absurdists, but transcends and departs from them. As such, it is worth noting that Beckett studies, especially in the last number of decades, has followed its own leads, not defaulting to Beckett as an absurdist to make sense of his work.

The early fifties found me in Paris, fresh out of college, in search of I'm not sure what gods or ghosts but convinced they could be discovered only in that magic city. I had found quarters, if that term can be applied to an abandoned warehouse, on the rue du Sabot, a tiny street directly behind St.-Germain-des-Prés. The owner was a Swiss dealer in primitive art. In return for my tending the shop a few hours a week, he gave me free lodging in an empty ground-floor warehouse at the end of the courtyard. I mention the geography because this dépôt— which, my Swiss landlord proudly informed me, had once been a banana-drying shed— was destined to become the headquarters of the magazine- and book-publishing enterprise known to history as Merlin and also because it was a scant fifty yards from the offices of the most daring and perceptive French publisher of the time, Les Editions de Minuit.

There were two routes from my warehouse-home to the bright cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés, one by the rue du Dragon, the other by the rue Bernard- Palissy, and since I took at least two trips to St.-Germain every day and always tried to avoid taking the same route twice in a row, it happened, almost inevitably, that I passed number 7 of the latter street at least once a day.

The philosopher E. M. Cioran knew Beckett in Paris, not very well but well enough to appreciate that he must keep his distance. When they met, he took care not to intrude: he allowed Beckett to lead the conversation, such as it was. Origins were not alluded to, either by a philosopher born in Romania or a dramatist and fiction-writer born in Ireland, both now resident in Paris. In 1976, thinking about those meetings, Cioran wrote:

I'll try to take that admonition into account, short of knowing precisely what it entails.

On April 21, 1935 – Easter Sunday – Oliver Sheppard's sculpture “The Death of Cuchulain” was unveiled in the centre of the General Post Office in Dublin. It was not designed for the occasion or commissioned by a government to celebrate, the following year, the twentieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, 1916. Sheppard created the sculpture in 1911/1912 before there was any symbolic or political call for it. The sculpture depicts Cuchulain, the mythical Celtic warrior, dying, tied to a rock to help him stand up to face his enemies, his body limp, his head rolled to one side, his shield falling from his grasp. A raven, signifying death, sits on his shoulder.

Samuel Beckett's resistance to self-refection, to a public metatext, to theorising his own theatre was legendary, and yet his personal letters and notebooks, his intimate, occasionally ‘uncautious’ conversations with directors and actors, were replete with just such reflections and revelations. While he told the critic Colin Duckworth in 1965, ‘I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my work’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv), his own musings – recorded in manuscripts and typescripts, in theatrical notebooks, in letters to directors, publishers, friends and confidants – constitute, collectively, just such critical insights.

The disparity suggests something of a multiplicity of voices, diction and contra-diction, a plural, at times a dialogic relation with his work. In one voice private discourse echoed public posture as it outlined a resistance to and incapacity for self-reflection. In a letter of 18 October 1954 to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett expressed a sense of diminished authority of authorship soon after translating Waiting for Godot. In a London meeting with Ralph Richardson, Beckett ‘told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters’ (Letters 2 507).

The position bordered on the obsessive and Beckett restated it to his American director Alan Schneider nearly a decade and a half later, on 16 October 1972, looping back again to the Richardson incident. This time the offending ‘stars’ were the legendary American theatrical couple, Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy, the play in question, Not I:

To Duckworth he termed that ‘stage entity’ merely ‘an object’: ‘I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv).

Samuel Beckett was a central influence on Stoppard, not only in early works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Jumpers that show direct links; in Beckett, Stoppard discovered his dramatic principles and the foundation of his humour.

In 1981, Beckett drafted a short two-part text entitled The Way, a version of which would appear in College Literature with the title “Criss-Cross to Infinity.”. This short text resonates with much of Beckett’s other work because it progresses a narrative via perambulation, and because the text revolves around a number, of sorts.Echoing key elements of Mercier and Camier (1946), Molloy and Malone Dies (both 1951), Enough (1965), and Quad (1981), The Way replaces rising and falling action, climax, and denouement with perambulatory rhythm. Common to all of these texts is also the seemingly oxymoronic “choreographed walk,” a combination of the aimless and the predetermined.