Word: beckett
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...Beckett's career, which began when he served as an aide to James Joyce and was capped in 1969 by a Nobel Prize, can be seen as a long, inexorable process of writing himself into a corner of silence. From the start, he was profoundly uninterested in the standard material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss...
Last Ditch. The power of Beckett's works springs from a contradiction deeper than theories and more profound than nihilism. Like the hobos, clowns, cripples and basket cases who make up his cast of characters, Beckett is a Poet of the Last Ditch, a Bard of the Bitter End. Like them, he knows that he wants to stop talking. Like them, he knows he cannot...
Faced with this dilemma, the typical Beckett figure manifests both weary resignation and fits of intense anger at a world he can neither take nor leave. As Waiting for Godot showed startled audiences in 1953, those face-changing moods can produce compelling theater. Since then, Beckett has devoted the bulk of his dwindling output to drama and to voices, in various stages of disembodiment, passing the time of their Lives. Ends and Odds collects the most recent examples and proves that Beckett is still strong medicine, even in small doses...
...example, a female speaker designated "Mouth" commits an extended monologue on the shock she felt when she found herself talking out loud after a mute childhood. She speaks in short, half-connected bursts, yet Beckett's stingy way with words captures her existence fully:"... parents unknown ... unheard of... he having vanished ... thin air ... no sooner buttoned up his breeches... she similarly... eight months later ... almost to the tick ... so no love ... spared that ... no love such as normally vented on the ... speechless infant..." In a phrase as simple as "spared that," Beckett blends savage humor and poignancy...
...pervading color of Ends and Odds is gray, a bleak miasma that convinces one character that "the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter." This backdrop accentuates the odd, vaudevillian turns that Beckett still keeps in his repertoire. He tosses off one-liners with apparent ease: "Ah, Morvan, you'd be the death of me if I were sufficiently alive!" His precise stage directions insist that props misfire with exquisite timing. He can make a character comment on a bit of stage business while implying a condemnation of life: "This gag has gone...