The most basic questions [in criticism] have to do with what in conventional literature would be called character and setting. But Beckett's reduction has robbed us of the use of these terms; at best we can speak only of the person or persons described in the pieces and the various places occupied. Who are the persons and where are the places?… [The Beckettian hero] is Everyman on his way from womb to tomb, traveling a journey not of his own choosing, but one thrust upon him by some obscure bungler who seems to be in charge of things…. [Each] is man suffering the absurdity of being forced to live on the planet Earth.

That the particular area of suffering is the hero's mind is suggested by a correspondence between some of the places occupied and the imagined interior of the human skull. But this correspondence is not needed to establish the sphere of human consciousness as the place described in each piece. Since Watt's futile struggle with the macrocosm, the successive heroes (except for the distraught protagonist of From an Abandoned Work) have descended ever deeper into the recesses of the microcosm. It is hardly possible that the surreal landscapes and interiors of this fiction are anything other than soulscapes of the mind. That the slime of How It Is and the sulfurous light of The Lost Ones resemble Dante's hell implies nothing more than Beckett's conviction that to be conscious is to be in a kind of hell. Descartes' cogito undergirds all of Beckett's work, and the assertion in Proust that "the world" is "a projection of the individual's consciousness" … is reinforced by Beckett's observation concerning Marcel's grandmother that "the dead are only dead in so far as they continue to exist in the heart of the survivor."… While care must be taken not to assign indiscriminately every Proustian concept discussed in Proust to Beckett, this view of the macrocosm's assuming reality only as it is assimilated into the microcosm obviously holds for both writers. Beckett joins Proust in accepting "Baudelaire's definition of reality as 'the adequate union of subject and object'."… This place within the human consciousness is the world of the imagination, but it is not an imaginary world: it alone defines reality…. The protagonists of these pieces are suspended, as it were, in the sphere of their own consciousness, between the false heaven of the macrocosm and the unplummeted hell of the microcosm. This sphere becomes a place of crucifixion where man as victim endures the suffering of self-perception…. (pp. 274-75)

The images in the soulscapes of the mind are those of stillness because what Beckett is depicting is an intensifying of the descent inward toward the core of consciousness, the innermost fountainhead of being.

The heroes have progressively moved toward stillness in order to escape the suffering experienced in macrocosm. The Unnamable, as he tries to descend into an area beneath the speaking consciousness, realizes that he is not in orbital motion, as he has previously thought, but that he is "fixed,"… and the voice of Texts possesses no body with which to move. Reinstated in a body cursed with frenzied motion in a violently unstable world, the protagonist of From an Abandoned Work hates movement of all kinds but has a "Great love" in his heart "for all things still and rooted."… The whiteness as a symbol of non-movement in this unfinished tale foreshadows the white stillness of Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping, where only minimal movements occur. The heart of the "little body" in Lessness is beating, but otherwise there is "no stir" in this landscape. Because the earth and sky are merged into one gray infinity, there is no space through which to move, and, because the scene is timeless, with no "passing light" of night and day, there is no time during which to move. Therefore, in this place of "endlessness," movement defined as motion through space and time is negated…. All verbs and references to movement belong to another world, that of the macrocosm. (p. 276)

[The last searcher in The Lost Ones] "finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and … the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point."… All previous movement is essentially a last struggle, the death throes of this final stillness…. Because Beckett has stated that Ping was written "in reaction to" The Lost Ones, it is possible to surmise that this last searcher becomes the motionless white body of the white enclosure of Ping. In negating the entire episode of How It Is, the final voice cancels all the preceding descriptions of movement. There has never been "any procession no nor any journey."… Of course, if the cancellation of movement is taken too literally, the entire three-part episode disappears with it, and we have no novel called How It Is. Perhaps it is wiser to see the nightmarish travels of Pim and Bom as a final struggle also—a desperate effort by a consciousness, now denied even its own voice, to unlock with a can opener the inner being of some other who, in all probability, is the elusive self, and thus to initiate the motionless crucifixion of further search into the soul.

The underlying theme of all of Beckett's work is this search of the heroes for whatever constitutes metaphysical reality, for the ground of being which is the essence of truth at the core of human experience. Obsessed with this search and supposing its object to be hidden in the recesses of the human consciousness, the heroes turn with an ascetic's scorn from the macrocosm and descend ever deeper into the microcosm…. Ignoring From an Abandoned Work, we may say that Texts is the last fiction to describe the search from the vantage point of the macrocosm. Because no possibility exists that the quest can be completed (its course is, by definition, an asymptotic progression toward zero), the self of the hero, in its plunge into the microcosm, encounters only what must be defined as nothingness. However, since what is being sought is very definitely something that is there, it is paradoxically not only negative but also positive—a Plenum-Void. (pp. 276-77)

Beginning with How It Is, the situation is no longer the macrocosm as the setting for an alienated microcosm, a human consciousness so separated from the outer world that it has shed its body, or even its voice. Instead, the landscape or interior is the microcosm, which is inhabited by the inner self, now split into a condition either of already being (in Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, and Lessness) or of becoming (in How It Is and The Lost Ones), a duality that conveniently may be described as the self-as-subject and the self-as-object. Thus the inner self, alienated from its own body and voice and having retreated from the macrocosm, becomes the object of its own perception in the confines of the mind. The perception is one of suffering because the self that is perceived (the objective self) is never found to be the true core of selfhood sought by the perceiving self (the subjective self)….

[One can speculate on] the interesting possibility that Beckett's core of the self is not the essence of reality, that the search is actually for something that would have to be called God, although a God is as impossible in Beckett's world as in Sartre's. (p. 277)

This quest for what the heroes assume to be the true core of the self can hardly be overemphasized in Beckett's fiction. Whatever the object of the quest is, to find this object would provide an answer to the riddle of what life is all about and would serve as a point of reference for human experience. Therefore, the continuing, futile search of the subjective self through layer after layer of objective selfhood becomes a suffering so acute that it can be termed a crucifixion. This observation points toward answers to questions raised in recent criticism concerning the Christ imagery in Ping. These images (nails, hair fallen, scars invisible, flesh torn of old …) are obviously references to the victimized god-man (of Dostoevsky and Hemingway), who, for Beckett, is the only Christ with any validity. Beckett's most exact depiction of this Christ occurs in Watt. Bloody and disheveled in the asylum garden, Watt is likened to Bosch's Christ (probably the figure of Christ Mocked in the National Gallery in London), who suffers universal crucifixion all men endure for Beckett's universal sin—that of having been born. In the late fiction the Calvary (skull-place) becomes the soulscape of the microcosm, and, specifically in Ping, a Christ-body suffers for all the lost ones. Particular care must be taken, in considering the question of consciousness in these pieces, not to equate the descent toward the core of the microcosm with a loss of self-awareness. Although the divided inner self can no longer communicate its experiences to the outside world (including us as readers), an intensification, not a lessening, of self-perception takes place. That a self that cannot voice I can nevertheless suffer the anguish of being is only to be expected in Beckett's world. The subjective self is acutely aware (as the impersonal narrator makes quite clear) of its terrifying descent inward and of its futile search for the true core of the self. The ascesis is a fleeing from macrocosmic consciousness trapped in the absurdity of time and space or in the meaningless flow of speech, but it is not a search for nonselfhood or oblivion. The goal is the seemingly impossible one of authentication, not annihilation, of being. There is nothing in any of the pieces to indicate that any figure has found release from the burden of self-awareness…. Any attempt, then to equate [these characters'] states of consciousness with stages of or lapses into oblivion or physical death is misleading. The stillness indicates the nonmovement of ascesis, not the absence of self-awareness. (p. 278)

The subjecting of any figure to darkness corresponds to that figure's terrifying descent inward, the agony of the approach toward nothingness. When Beckett uses darkness metaphorically or symbolically, it is nearly always in association with something that is unclear or irrational, or something that causes suffering. (pp. 278-79)

A knowledge of qualities such as truth, beauty, love, and justice is reason enough for man to expect the world to be a place where the realization of such qualities is at least possible, but Beckett's world is no such place. In this later fiction, as in the earlier, this macrocosm of false promise is symbolized by a nature … that wears a mask of order and beauty hiding a reality of suffering and death. Functioning as symbol, nature becomes essentially ironic—a symbol of a nonexistent Eden that man somehow senses should be his birthright and for which he intuitively longs, but which he can never possess. In these pieces nearly every infusion of macrocosmic light into the dark worlds of the microcosm is described in natural imagery, thus suggesting the suffering of being unable to escape an awareness of an environment that cannot deliver what it seems to promise of happiness. (p. 281)

Beckett's designation of residua for Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping is a particularly apt term for all this later fiction, but not if the word is taken to mean something extraneous that remains or what is left over as dregs when the main substance is removed. In spite of stripped form and condensed wording, these pieces are the concentrated essence, the quintessence, of the entire Beckettian oeuvre. Although Beckett is endlessly finding new forms for his art, the expression of that art remains the same—"a tale … signifying nothing." But we must not be deceived concerning the significance of these tales. As Beckett's heroes and Democritus know quite well—"nothing is more real than nothing." (p. 283)