Beckett, Samuel | Paul Lawley (essay date January 2000)
Paul Lawley (essay date January 2000)
SOURCE: Lawley, Paul. “‘The Rapture of Vertigo’: Beckett's Turning-Point.” Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 (January 2000): 28-40.
[In the following essay, Lawley probes Beckett's characters' tendency to leave the known—albeit unhappy—stability of their lives and throw themselves, unbalanced, toward death, chaos, and subsequent rebirth.]
In interview, Samuel Beckett always evinced a sharp sense of the shape of his creative life. There had been a large shift and it had been relatively sudden, a recognizable turning-point: ‘Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly’ [‘le jour où j'ai pris conscience de ma bêtise’], he told Gabriel D'Aubarède in 1961; ‘only then did I begin to write the things I feel.’1 The nature of the shift is clear from a number of sources. The work of James Joyce was the necessary point of reference in...
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