Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since existentialism includes a large number of literary and semi-literary works, the question arises as to what literature is "existential" and what is not. Professor Earle regards Sartre's literary work as "realist" rather than existential. "For my money," he said, "Samuel Beckett is doing the most authentic existentialist writing...
...UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: "complete disintegration." Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner's wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds...
...Author Beckett (Waiting For Godot) himself never answers these questions about his central character. His identity and his past remain obscure-beyond the fact that Mahood's entire family was killed off by sausage poisoning. But it does not take much imagination to see in Mahood (Manhood?) Author Beckett's savage symbol for mankind. Beckett's great strength is to make his readers uneasy. Like all Beckettmen, Mahood echoes the old existentialist plaint that he did not ask to be born and that life's mess is not of his making. Despairingly he sums...
...lost art of satire, and both flop for the same reasons. Felicia Lamport's "By Henry James Cozened" begins with a light touch, lapses into gray elaboration, and drags on to repetitive dreariness. Maura Cavanaugh (a Radcliffe History major) embarks on a twenty page slash of Samuel Beckett in a vindictive farce called "Waiting for God." Both satires lack any self-substance beyond the parody. Both blunder on after the comic veneer has worn thin enough to recognize their paucity. And both conveniently ignore or unhappily miss a good deal of their victims' subtleties...
...lines of dialogue, then proceed to improvise a scene on the spot, using one line as the start and the other line as the end. Furthermore, they will produce the dialogue in any literary style the audience suggests-Proust or Erskine Caldwell, Li'l Abner or Samuel Beckett. (A Faulknerian bit by Elaine: "And there she was feeling her armpits-glad that they were there...