Word: notional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DEATH PENALTY. Proposition 17 was part of a national effort to reverse the Supreme Court's ruling and revive the death penalty (see THE LAW). The arguments were familiar: those in favor talked of deterrent value, those opposed belittled that notion and spoke impassionedly of the sanctity of human life. Still, voters chose reinstatement by a more than 2-to-1 margin. The vote was a statement of principal rather than binding legislation, but it may indicate that the death penalty is not yet dead...
...condense a whole realm into these sixty pages, and yet develop that whole from a single notion, Beckett employs a thoroughly analytic form of organization. Instead of Dante's rings, the description is ordered into sections of increasing specificity, moving from the most obvious facts of life in the cylinder, to particular numbers, times, physical configurations of the light and temperature cycles or the exact traffic pattern followed by various groups on the floor of the cylinder. In this natural history of a hell, only three or four individual men are picked out of the mass, and only about...
...best." Then, soon, the last searcher ceases searching and joins the ranks of the vanquished, and the last sentence comes, as exact and pitiless as the first: "So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers...if this notion is maintained...
...Lost Ones is not a story in any traditional sense, but the analytic creation of a paradigm for the base of our entire existence. However battered and strained the term is, the end of this relentless analysis is unavoidably the absurd. Even when the notion has been maintained to its fullest, a final explanation continues to elude it, and instead in its very absence mocks the exactness with which the analysis has been conducted...
...absurd, in all its tedium and inexplicability, if only in a sort of dadaist image, a kind of giant coffee can with strobe light. The boredom is less involving than in Godot, the texture of the prose less rich than in the novels, but by maintaining its peculiar notion. The Lost Ones creates a super-metaphor with a life of its own. Beckett's latest book looks at the world with intent, unshrinking understanding--and touches its expression with an uncertain gleam of the playful...