In English the Irish are the great sentimentalists. The dour Scots, the babbling Welsh, and the destiny-laden English are not in it for sheer heart-wringing sentiment, the chuckle that stops short in a sob, the tear in the sparkling eye. Pause now for an ad hoc definition: sentimentality emphasizes not the racking passions—snarling hatred, implacable resentment, love that makes the heart leap in its bone-cage—no, not those, but the retrospective melancholy of sweet love lost, life's intensity cooled, chances missed and the road not taken, the living backwards with one's wet eye fixed on what might have been, with the absurd conviction that what can never come again was unutterably valuable … ah there! and ah then! Paradise lost, in short, with the addition offered by Samuel Beckett, that the only true paradise is the paradise that has been lost.

In art, especially in Irish art, as in life, the signs of sentimentality are easy to read: the dying fall and the fragmented speech; the gesture halfhearted and abortive, as when the arms that reached out briefly toward another return to hug the self; the tale set in the past and told with the brevity of a foreknown defeat, reaching no climax, fizzling out…. No one recently has chronicled this post-Finnegan fall better than Samuel Beckett.

There is no intention here to sell sentimentality short. Not only is it a valid basis for grasping at life's fleeting feelings while avoiding its traumatizing horrors but, more to the point, it is capable of generating remarkably enjoyable art. For most of his literary life Beckett has performed rigadoons, pavanes, and dances of death over his touching themes. Like Jackson Pollock on canvas, Beckett has overlaid his texts and textures with all the glitter of Irish wit, Celtic theology, European literature, and Catholic philosophy, interalia. But the paint thinned to a trickle with the last words of the last novel of his immensely impressive trilogy: "I can't go on, I'll go on." In one more novel, How It Is, and in handfuls of smaller texts, Beckett did indeed attempt to go on with his old themes—the isolated self, the mental being in a physical world, the irrelevance of knowledge, the evasiveness of identity, the absence of objective truth, the meaningless patterns of our eternal recurrences—but he stripped his investigation of its previous baroque complexities, whittled it down to the bare bones of immediate experience, and still found himself, and still finds himself, at the threshold, only beginning to end.

Meanwhile a new set of more explicitly emotional themes had begun to orchestrate themselves. In due time scholars will probably fix its official overture by triangulating Beckett's postwar visit to his dying mother in Ireland, his play Krapp's Last Tape, and his curious French poem "Mort de A.D."… Until all this is clarified we can only note that in the many plays and short fictions of Beckett's later years the dominant themes are regret, remorse, inescapable loneliness, lost love, and wasted life. That voice in the protagonist's head is not now occupied in bullying him or her about identity, meaning, or duty; instead it voices the agenbite of inwit. But not gnawing about great sins committed or great deeds botched: Beckett's themes, more obviously than before, are those of sentimentality, of paradise lost or missed out on. The Beckett who once performed such mental gymnastics to prove that happiness is impossible now creates character after character who regrets what might after all have been, or who is inconsolable about a life to which no lasting happiness has come. The essence of this new complex is evoked in one of his present fizzles, a short piece entitled "Still." It consists basically of one described movement in which a character seated and staring fixedly out a window at the dying day raises one hand and rests his face in it. But Beckett's dry, minimally concerned narrative voice describes this gesture with preternatural concern, breaking it down into split-second sequences as a moving-picture film would do; and this intense focus on the emotional significance of a detached, momentary gesture evokes sentimentality at its finest—the quintessence, one suspects, of dozens of Victorian engravings. (pp. 216-17)

Like most writers who concentrate on the essence of a theme rather than its complexity, Beckett has found himself writing increasingly briefer and more condensed works in recent years. He is concerned with situations, not with the problems and resolutions that constitute plot. As a result his fictions have come to resemble prose poems, and his plays approach tableaux vivants. In both forms motion takes on the character of musical theme rather than goal-oriented action; repetition is basic to it, a repetition characteristically stopped short in favor of the final silence to which Beckett so often calls our attention. His two present collections, the theatre pieces of Ends and Odds and the abandoned prose Fizzles, demonstrate all these qualities, though some of them remind us also of the drawn out dying of his earlier concerns.

Most of the fizzles were written first in French and published first as Foirades. For the most part they are abortive attempts, stories that never got off the ground (Beckett's harsher unofficial title was "Shit"), and they show him attempting to get plots underway, to find a satisfactory third-person narrative voice, to develop obstinately static situations. (p. 217)

Since they really are what they claim to be, the publication of the fizzles is puzzling, but the eight stage and radio plays of Ends and Odds need little excuse. The Odds, described as "Roughs for Theatre and Radio," are untitled and on the whole unsatisfactory, and they include some curious revivals of Beckett's strange interest in those vaguely official scribes, detectives, and enforcers … who from time to time lend a depressing air of Chesterton or Graham Greene to his writing. But in three of the Ends, Not I, That Time, and Footfalls, the collection offers some of Beckett's finest dramatic work. In each, the mind divided against itself expresses life at a dead end, existence aborted, the sense—to which Beckett has turned so often in his later works—that one has never really been born. "Never the time and the place and the loved one all together," Browning wrote; never a consummation of life. Beckett is quick to add that even if the occasion should offer, we are likely to be looking away, and that even if the consummation should improbably occur, we should still be obliged to live beyond it for many an endless year. Such stipulations lie at the melancholy heart of the sentimental experience, and these plays, brief and even dry as they appear on the page, can wring that heart painfully, as many theatregoers have already testified. (pp. 217, 219)

These plays are not tragic, though they have been called so; tragedies deal with a much wider compass of significance, much deeper confrontations with existence. But these are marvelous sentimentality, worth any theatregoer's hushed attention. (p. 219)