Eng426 20th century english literature

1.0INTRODUCTION

Samuel Beckett was one of the prominent playwrights and theatre practitioners of the Twentieth century. He was regarded as one of the late modernist writers and one of the renowned theatre of the absurd dramatists. In this Unit we shall discuss Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot.

0. OBJECTIVES

At the end of the Unit you should be able to:

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  Explain the phrase “theatre of the absurd”
  
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  Describe the relationship between the thematic concerns and the dramaturgy of
  

Waiting for Godot and modernism.

0. MAIN CONTENT

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   Samuel Beckett
   

Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland on April 13, 1906 to William Frank Beckett a civil engineer and May Barclay. While growing up, Samuel Beckett was the outdoor type who often goes out with his brother and cousin and when he is not, he retreats to his tower with a book. Early in his life, his family noticed a certain moodiness and taciturnity about him. He attended Trinity College where he studied English, Italian, and French. He taught at Campbell College and École Normale Supérieure.

He met James Joyce in 1926 and loved his works and James Joyce became a great influence on his own creative works. He travelled around Europe for a while before he settled in Paris. His first published work “Assumption” is a short story which was published in Transition a serial edited by Franco-American writer, Eugene Jolas. He won his first literary prize the following year with the poem, “Whoroscope”. He published Proust a critical study of Marcel Proust’s work and his only long work on criticism.

In 1933, William, Samuel Beckett’s father died and due to the closeness they had, the loss devastated Beckett and he went to Tavistock Clinic in London for treatment by the influential psychoanalyst, Dr. Wilfred Brion who also studied him. This was where he attended a lecture by Carl Jung on the “Never Properly Born” which affected much of his subsequent works including Watt, Waiting for Godot and All That Fall.

He married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, a French woman in 1961.After the World War II he had a critical epiphany premised on his fear of remaining in James Joyce’s shadows. That was when he discovered that his own strength lies in writing about impoverishment, lack of knowledge, taking away rather than adding. He had the belief that to not have the desire to acquire more knowledge is the key to having peace. He argued that desire is the source of human misery and that peace will only be possible when desire is removed all together. He was a playwright, novelist and poet who became known for his works that dealt with the traumatic effects of the world wars. He wrote most of his works in French because he found it easier to write without style, that is,

without the conventional boundaries of writing in English language. After writing in French, he would later translate them to English. His works include, Eleutheria, Molloy, The Unnamable, Happy Days and so on. However, Waiting for Godot is more widely known than other works by him.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation. From his childhood, Beckett was a private person, who enjoyed his solitude. So much was his love for solitude that when his wife heard the news of his Nobel prize award, she described it as a catastrophe for her extremely private husband. This characteristic as well as his various influences and past experiences made him a natural fit into the theme that defined his famous writings as an absurdist. His writings showed the meaninglessness of life in the post World War period and how there is absolutely nothing but frustration and unfulfilled expectations in life.

His philosophy was that man was doomed to be lonely and that even if God were to exist, He would be as lonely and enslaved and as isolated as man is in a cold silent, indifferent universe. So, in his works, especially, Waiting for Godot he lampoons the idea of waiting on the supernatural to solve man’s problems or as a way of escape from the world’s harsh realities. He is described as an agnostic by most critics of his works and the tone of his writing is often pessimistic and enigmatic. He died in 1989 on 22nd of December, five months after his wife.

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