Beckett, Samuel (Vol. 3) - Beckett, Samuel 1906–

Beckett, Samuel 1906–

Beckett, an Irish-born French writer, was the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1969. His plays and novels, fundamental to Absurd literature, are seen as the existential metaphor of the human condition. Alone, impotent, despairing, Beckett's characters inhabit a void wherein speech is impossible; compelled to speak, their inarticulate expressions of anguish approach the edges of the dramatic and novelistic arts. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)

First written like Waiting for Godot in French for the French avant-garde stage, Fin de Partie was translated by the author into English under the Joycean title of Endgame. The texture of the work in English was therefore entirely authentic, and it is the texture rather than the transparent structure (of which there is little) that provides the meaning of the work. Hardly anything happens in the play; nearly everything that might have...

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