Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Beckett, Samuel - Daniel Katz (essay date 1999)

Daniel Katz (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: Katz, Daniel. “‘Ways of Being We’: The Subject as Method, Method as Ritual in Watt.” In Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, pp. 43-70. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Katz studies Watt as a transition between Beckett's life in Ireland and England and his move to France as well as between his early conventionally composed works and his later experimental writing.]

Beckett's mystifying second novel, Watt, seems to have generated two main lines of critical approach. One influential trend points to the mock-Cartesian elements of the novel and reads it as a critique of rationalist epistemological pretensions regarding both hermeneutics and problem solving. As Thomas Cousineau writes, “Critics have tended to treat Watt as an allegory in which human beings' rationalistic...

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