1906-1989 Irish novelist and playwright One of the great names of the “Theatre of the Absurd” along with Eugene Ionesco Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family. His father, William Beckett Jr. was a surveyor. Beckett’s mother Mary Roe had worked as a nurse before marriage. He was educated at the Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a B.A. degree in 1927, having specialized in French and Italian. Beckett worked as a teacher in Belfast and lecturer in English at the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris. In his writings for theatre, Beckett showed influence of burlesque, vaudeville, the music hall, commedia dell’arte, and the silent-film style of such figures as Keaton and Chaplin His plays are concerned with human suffering and survival His characters are struggling with meaninglessness and the world of Nothing A comic writer, as well as a tragic poet Considers the bare essentials of the human condition in his writing He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 During this time he became a friend of James Joyce, taking dictation and copying down parts of what would eventually becomes Finnegans Wake (1939). He also translated a fragment of the book into French under Joyce’s supervision. In 1931 Beckett returned to Dublin and received his M.A. in 1931. He taught French at Trinity College until 1932, when he resigned to devote his time entirely to writing. After his father died, Beckett received an annuity that enabled him to settle in London, where he underwent psychoanalysis (1935-36). As a poet, Beckett made his debut in 1930 with WHOREOSCOPE, a ninety-eight-line poem accompanied by seventeen footnotes. In this dramatic monologue, the protagonist, Rene Descartes, waits for his morning omelet of well-aged eggs, while mediating on the obscurity of theological mysteries, the passage of time, and the approach of death. It was followed with a collection of essays, PROUST (1931), and novel MORE PRICKS THAN KNICKS (1934). From 1933 to 1936 he lived in London. In 1938 he was hospitalized from a stab wound he had received from a pimp to whom he refused to give money. Around this time he met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, a piano student, whom he married in 1961 When Beckett won the Nobel Prize, Suzanne commented: “This is a catastrophe.” Beckett refused to attend the Nobel ceremony. Beckett’s career as a novelist really began in 1938 with MURPHY, which depicted the protagonist’s inner struggle between his desires for his prostitute-mistress and for total escape into the darkness of mind. The conflict is resolved when he is atomized by a gas explosion. When World War II broke out, Beckett was in Ireland, but he hastened to Paris and joined a Resistance network. He was sought out by the Nazis but fled with Dechevaux-Dumesnil to Southern France, where they remained in hiding in the village of Roussillon two and a half years. Beckett worked as a country labourer and wrote WATT, his second novel, which was published in 1953 and was the last of his novels written originally in English. After the war, Beckett worked with the Irish Red Cross in St. Lo in Normandy. He wrote a number of other works in French, which he explained he felt made it easier to write “without style”- he did not try to write elegantly. Beckett’s writing attempted to escape from everything that he was familiar with. His books reflected Beckett’s bitter realization that there is no escape from illusions and from the Cartesian compulsion to think, to try to solve insoluble mysteries. Beckett was obsessed by the desire to create what he called “a literature of the unword.” He waged a lifelong war on words, trying to yield the silence that underlines them. Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot) was written in 1949 and published in English in 1954. It brought Beckett international fame and established him as one of the leading names of the theater of the absurd. Beckett more or less admitted in a New York Post interview by Jerry Tallmer that the dialogue was based on converstaions between Suzanne Deschevaux- Dumesnil and himself in Roussillon. The tragi-comedy in two acts, opened at the Theatre de Babylone on January 5 1953, and made history. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Gogo and Didi, meet near a bare tree on a country road. They wait for the promised arrival of Godot, whose name could refer to “God” or also the French name for Charlie Chaplin, “Charlot”. To fill the boredom they try to recall their past, tell jokes, eat and speculate about Godot. Pozzo, a bourgeois tyrant, and Lucky, his servant, appear briefly. Pozzo says about Lucky: “He can’t think without his hat.” Godot sends world that he will not come that day but will surely come the next. In Act II Vladimir and Estragon still wait, and Godot sends a promising message. The two men try to hang themsleves and then declare their intention of leaving, but they have no energy to move. In Beckett’s philosophical show, there is no meaning without being. The very existence of Vladimir and Estragon is in doubt. Without Godot, their world do not have purpose, but suicide is not the solution to their existential dilemma. VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow. ESTRAGON: What for? VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot. ESTRAGON: Ah! (Silence.) He didn’t come? VLADIMIR: No. Beckett demonstrates that when put in extreme situations, these characters tell us the most about us (the audience) and our own lives. Estragon and Vladimir are always on the edge of wandering away to another and equally disappointing adventure throughout the play. Following Godot, Beckett wrote many other works up until right before his death. To this day he is revered as being an integral part of the Western literary canon.
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