Beckett's fiction

Samuel Beckett’s commitment to absurdist literary principles and practices is beyond doubt but critical attention to this orientation is most often focused on the drama. This chapter, by contrast, shows how Beckett adapts and recasts the precepts of the absurd in his long-form fictional works. Rather than emphasise the ‘human condition’, a critical touchstone for the theatre of the absurd, I point out the political ramifications of Beckett’s novels - made legible, in the first instance, through history, and then via their inscriptions on the physical body and its limits. The chapter surveys the three ‘phases’ of Beckett’s career, beginning in the 1930s with the foreboding sense of crisis, which peaks with Watt (composed 1941-1944) and the quest to find a novelistic language for madness. In the immediate postwar years, codes and ciphers underpin Beckett’s Trilogy, culminating in the corporeal conundrums of The Unnamable (1953). And in the final phase, initiated with How It Is (1961), the direnesses of the Algerian War is refracted through Beckett’s fixation on torture, suffering and regulated cruelty.