The inarticulable in Samuel Beckett's late short prose works

Abstract

The notion of the inarticulable is evidently a central thematic and formal preoccupation throughout Samuel Beckett's writing career. The starting point of this dissertation will be addressing the difficulty, or rather the impossibility of expression in his works. This will be mainly observed in the post-How It Is short prose works, otherwise known as the Residua. The latter texts will be shown to embody the Beckettian impasse, one in which failure becomes the artist's world. The texts also become emblematic of his ever-increasing 'fidelity to failure'. This work will also deal with the notion of silence that haunts the self-conscious artist, witnessed in the minimalist quality of such distilled works. The second and most significant chapter will attempt to explore these elements in Beckett's works through Derridean post-structuralist theory. Inarticulability finds its source in the multiplicity of signification and reference implied by a linguistic sign. The dissertation will therefore resort to the works of Jacques Derrida, indispensable to a theoretical interpretation of Beckett's texts. Several compatibilities will be drawn between the philosopher who, Derek Attridge maintains, acknowledges the importance of 'ambivalence', 'indeterminacy', and the writer who perceives a danger in that 'neatness of identifications'. The Derridean notions of difference, supplementation, and trace, among others, will be deployed in the attempt of a poststructuralist analysis of Beckett's later works, whose very liminality requires several 'acts' of reading in very much a Derridean manner.