[No] one has been more felicitous in illustrating black humor than Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days, as she asks the rhetorical question: "How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?"… (p. 89)

One usually remembers with glee the scene in Gulliver's Travels where he tells about his arrival in the land of the Lilliputians and—frightening monster that he appears to be—has to submit to a minute search of his person by the country's officers. "I took up the two officers in my hands," he reports, "put them first into my coat-pockets, and then into every other pocket about me, except my two fobs, and another secret pocket which I had no mind should be searched, wherein I had some little necessaries that were of no consequence to any but myself. In one of my fobs there was a silver watch, and in the other a small quantity of gold in a purse." (p. 90)

If Swift's humor … provides us with a satire of and an insight into the spirit of the eighteenth century by revealing to us the content of Gulliver's pockets, Beckett's humor displays before us a great number of characters provided with or even contained in pockets and redolent of the spirit of our age as well as timelessly pointing beyond it. (p. 95)

It is perhaps because Beckett's protagonists are so often on the go, and carry all their belongings with them, that their pockets and bags are given so much attention in almost every one of his works. The protagonist of Watt, for example, as if to emphasize the futility and emptiness of his existence and to symbolize homeless man clinging to useless possessions, usually carries about two small bags. They are preferable to one large bag, he tells us, and he would have preferred to carry none at all. Those bags are three-fourths empty. One of them is carried by Watt as if it were a club, the other as if it were a sandbag. What they contain Watt never divulges, for what counts is that they are cumbersome and yet difficult to abandon; self-imposed yet insignificant—like most of man's burdens. In Waiting for Godot, Lucky almost collapses under the weight of a heavy suitcase each time he appears on stage. He seems unable even to put down his load and seems doomed to carry it for eternity.

There are other Beckett characters with pockets full of such futile objects as pieces of string, carrots, and turnips. Among them are Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot. The protagonists of the unpublished novel Mercier et Camier ransack the pockets of their only possession, a raincoat, before abandoning it, and find there "a whole life."… (p. 97)

[In the novel How It Is] the protagonist crawling naked through the mud clutches a sack which is tied around his neck with a cord. It contains cans of tuna which he opens by means of a can opener and whose content he consumes from time to time listlessly. In its sadism and its humor, which is as black as the mud, this novel seems to stress the sack as container even more than its content. The fact that the word sack belongs to the few basic words of the Indo-European vocabulary which have maintained themselves in almost unchanged form in all its tongues attests to its fundamental significance. Being capable of an infinite number of sexual and basic biological connotations, the word occurs in innumerable metaphoric and proverbial expressions and can be associated with gestation, birth, and burial. Not only the protagonist is naked here, but his entire world has been reduced and stripped to its essentials.

One does not need a Lilliputian point of view to see reflected in such pockets filled with strings, burnt matches, and dust, such sacks carried by naked protagonists crawling in the mud the reflection of a universe which is far removed from that of Swift. In the black humor of Beckett neither reason nor the inventions of man's fertile mind finds expression. Man seems no longer the master of a universe which he can bend to his desires and from which he can extract useful tools—as long as he adheres to reason. His life is but dust. The objects which surround him encumber him, rather than help him by their purposefulness. If he introduces objects in his writing, Beckett, unlike some contemporary French novelists who have "taken the side of things," reveals a world where "things are in the saddle and ride mankind." This is, above all, the impression conveyed by Winnie, the protagonist of his play Happy Days…. Winnie's vanity and adherence to decorum become ludicrous in view of her strangely stationary and totally isolated existence, and we inadvertently join in her "sniggering" and her "laughing wild amid severest woe." (pp. 98-9)

Winnie's world gains a deeper significance because she herself is in a pocket as it were. For she is buried in a mound of earth, at first to her waist and then to her neck. Alone in that deserted plain and in her pocket-like mound, Winnie seems almost a stage rendering of Heidegger's concept of Dasein, that is, of human existence. She seems to be that lumen naturale that sheds the light of human understanding upon the universe of which man is part, bestowing individuality and temporality on that-which-is-there. Without her presence, the plain wherein she is situated, the clouds in the sky would be the same but would remain undifferentiated. Winnie seems, however, helplessly "thrown," in the Heideggerian sense, into time, place and human-ness, while surrounded by the implements which belong to the everyday existence of man. But she also evokes Kierkegaard's "knight of infinite resignation" as she indulges in the humdrum occupations of Everyman (or Everywoman in her case) and does so with what would seem an inner freedom, the result of her awareness of the absurdity and paradox of existence. She seems to be inspired by the Kierkegaardian belief that the conception of an eternal happiness transforms the individual's entire existence and "is a process of dying away from the immediate." For while she busies herself with the numerous things that are all about her in bag and bodice, her mind desires to be free—even of her body which is imprisoned in the large pocket of the earth. She can call the day a happy day and yet long for the moment "when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours" and when she "would simply float up into the blue."

Yet even the human mind is envisioned by Beckett as something like a pocket, something similar to a sphere or a sack. (pp. 99-100)

[In the novel Molloy the] room where Molloy, turned writer, arrives after his wanderings, "his mother's room" or womb, resembles [a] dimly lighted limbo. And similar limbos are inhabited by Malone and the Unnamable: enclosures that are limp and shapeless, permeated by a grayish light—sacks. They evoke the image of the Baudelairean "gouffre interdit à nos sondes," to which Beckett refers in his essay on Proust and wherein he sees "stored the essence of ourselves, the best of our many selves and their concretions that simplicists call the world." This was the source, Beckett claimed, from which "Proust hoisted his world," using "involuntary memory" as his "diver." For Beckett, then, the writer's experience consists above all of descent, and his task is to report of the treasures he has found in that bottomless sack filled with pure forms and commotion.

It is obvious that, unlike that of his literary Irish ancestor, Beckett's humour noir no longer implies a belief in man's ultimate salvation to be reached through the use of reason and ingenuity. What is contained in the pockets of his protagonists progressively defies order and purpose. It bespeaks, on the contrary, a universe both adrift and encumbered with meaningless objects, a universe which has lost the conviction that machines are perfect and that man may strive for perfection with their help. In this world, machines—whether human bodies or bicycles—decay and remain as sheer memories. It is as impersonal as the world of Lemuel Gulliver. Not because man is considered here above all a social being but because his individuality is but ephemeral in the perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. Thus what man carries in his pockets, bags, or sacks becomes less and less meaningful and is discarded until from the pockets of earth and body there emerges man's mind replete with treasures which no Lilliputian but only the writer can extract and present to our disbelieving and wondering eyes. (pp. 101-02)