Beckett is Irish as was Joyce; but there is no sign that the politics of Irish independence ever disturbed Beckett as they did the writer who was eighteen years his senior…. Beckett makes only vague, distant, and occasional allusions to Ireland in his fiction. Names of characters apart, a couple of hundred words deleted from his four-hundred-page trilogy would efface every recognizable vestige of Ireland and the Irish. Irish folklore and Irish humor hardly exist in Beckett's world, even for purposes of parody or sardonic comment…. Beckett could much more properly, be described as a Parisian who was born in Ireland…. (pp. 90-1)

Beckett is … [close] to wholly mythless man; the philosophical problem which preoccupies him is the relation or non-relation between the mind and exterior reality, and to this problem ecclesiasticism, with all its trappings, is wholly irrelevant. Joyce sees through the exterior tegument of the world to a meaning hidden behind its physical texture; Beckett, in traditional Protestant fashion, hears inner voices. They do not seem to say the traditional things to him or to his characters, but they guide both along that quest or pilgrimage which is the oldest and most traditional of Protestant metaphors for the spiritual life. In their different unbelieving ways, both Joyce and Beckett are haunted by the doubt that the God in whom they disbelieve may exist, probably as a secret, malignant force concerned chiefly with tormenting His creatures. (p. 91)

In his early prose particularly, [Beckett] is not above using an occasional exotic reference like William of Champeaux, very much as Joyce makes use of Joachim Abbas; but the later style of Beckett is harder, dryer, flatter, more stripped than anything in Joyce. Along with the specifics of time, place, and particular reference, circumlocutions and metaphors drop away; the later art of Beckett depends on utter simplicity of diction and grammar, frequent repetition, carefully controlled rhythm. (p. 92)

So far as Beckett concerns himself with pattern at all, it is with incomplete pattern; his circles are never closed, his lists are always bogus, when he plays games they cry aloud in advance their own meaninglessness. The depth of Beckett's morbidity is sometimes obscured by his extraordinary comic touch; the comic inspiration of Joyce is sometimes swamped by the gigantic structural complexity of his books.

Joyce … was a man who aspired by a process of addition to put everything into his volumes; Beckett, working by a contrary arithmetic, has steadily subtracted more and more from his books, emptying them of substance, and working toward the cold and dark of a naked consciousness, aware only of itself, confronting the absolute zero of non-experience. Every one of Joyce's books is in its own way a summa—[Finnegans Wake] most of all; Beckett's writings all aspire to the condition of nullas—questioning, thus, the nature of their own existence in a manner more radical than Joyce ever attempted. Joyce's undertaking may have been megalomaniac, but it was not absurd, did not involve a contradiction in terms. (p. 93)

The core of [Beckett's] problematic has always been the extravagant, almost vindictive isolation of [his] characters from one another, from the resources of history, society, and their own past—even from their own minds. In fact, we wrong them even to talk of them as "characters"; for though there are in the various books entities called "Murphy," "Watt," and so forth, these are mere verbal parcels of convenience; their ingredients are jumbled together as provisionally and insecurely as the contents of a grocery bag. It is their disintegration, continuous from work to work and continuous in that context as nothing is within the individual fictions, that makes for the fascination of Beckett's oeuvre.

The first of the major books, Murphy, seems closest to being a "normal" fiction, having a sort of intrigue, a distinct locale, and several personages who surround the central enigma and try with comic ineptitude to interact with him. But Murphy himself, with his icy eyes and utter indifference to all others and everything other than his own mind, is one of the coldest and least human of Beckett's isolatos…. The highest and most satisfying level of his mental activity is described as that which involves most complete autonomy for the mind—the achievement of a dark containing

neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion or the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line. Matrix of surds….

Behind this complex panoply of metaphorical disguises lies the concept of chaos, perhaps as figured in the concept of Brownian motion; as a "matrix of surds," or womb of irrationals, Murphy instinctively moves toward madness as a state of ultimate satisfaction. (pp. 95-6)

A plot which runs the protagonist so directly and eagerly toward the large black hole which awaits us all, and which most of us would take some pains to avoid, needs no motive energy to move it forward, but rather brakes to hold it back. Murphy is the best example prior to Godot of a literary action used to postpone rather than advance the movement of a development possessing its own inertia. Since he has no real function in moving forward the story (it gets where it is inevitably going without any of his efforts), the author is free to embroider intellectual and stylistic curlicues on the margins of the tale—which he does with the owlish solemnity of an insane scholar….

The subzero temperature of Murphy's major theme is partly mitigated by the drollery of its manner, and many readers have found it the most accessible of Beckett's fictions—partly, perhaps, because they take it at about three-quarters of its basic potency. (p. 97)

Like Murphy, [Watt] is a matrix of surds; and, as with Murphy, all his intellectual defeats and impasses seem to flow from a central incapacity to define what (Watt) is man. In Watt we have a first manifestation of that clown-in-waiting around whom Godot is built; we have the further pathos of an irrelevant vocation and a mind alienated among its own games. There is the pedantry-shtik in the form of a hilarious mock-examination; there are the pratfalls interspersed with metaphysics, the robot-mannerisms interrupted by Pascalian shivers at the silence of infinite space. Yet by and large the book is static, and its disparate parts do not successfully interact with one another. Some people have suggested that the impasse which the book represents derives from its relation to Joyce, its over-dependence on a baroque style. Apart from the absurdity of identifying the baroque style with Joyce, this doesn't seem right in itself. What Watt lacked was precisely the kind of inward and unifying passion, the sense of seeing into something and making a felt whole of it, the immediately present example of which was Finnegans Wake. Evidently, abandoning English helped Beckett toward a new sort of book by cutting off certain sorts of verbal vaudeville. No doubt the loneliness and the danger of the war years, and the gigantic questions they posed about the nature and the future of man, also pushed him toward the stripped and inward vision. But I do not think the great breakthrough of the immediate post-war years was for Beckett an escape from Joyce so much as a fulfilling of himself through a part of Joyce that he had not previously tapped, at least not very successfully. He could no longer stand outside his characters and watch them perform; he had to get in them and through them. And they were, because of their alien, alienated disposition, and the nothingness immediately beyond them, far harder to get into than any figures in the Joycean oeuvre. (pp. 98-9)

By abandoning Joyce in order to pursue himself, Beckett rediscovered Joyce. He did so not through the use of Joycean techniques—out of the entire panoply of Joycean techniques, Beckett took over only the interior monologue—but in a much less specific way…. [In the mature work of Beckett, Joyce] is nowhere overtly, but everywhere tacitly and by implication. Classical analogues, Viconian cycles, macaronic speech-distortions, mosaic composition, archetypes of all sorts—the great clanking machinery of Joycean fiction drops away. There remains the unbroken murmur of a confession made without a priest, a sifting and straining of the consciousness, a casting aside of everything which is not the quicksilver moment of self-awareness. This is not Joycean, it is Joyce.

The first novel of the trilogy, Molloy, is on the whole the most classical and humane, even hopeful, of Beckett's books. It is the story of two interlocked, middle-aged, vaguely Irish males; Molloy is on a pilgrimage to his mother's house, Moran is under a mysterious injunction … to seek Molloy. (pp. 99-100)

The two stories, which are largely separate and particularly hazy at the moment when they coincide (if they do), must be joined by the reader through counter-poised judgments of Molloy and Moran. The former is ascetic, unworldly, a physical wreck but somehow marked with the almost visible trait of nobility. With policemen and churches he has nothing whatever in common. Moran, on the other hand, is mean, prudent, spiteful, and legalistic—a rate-payer, a church-goer, a model of minor officialdom; his treatment of his son is a nightmare of petty tyranny. The pair might be variously considered as open and closed, as ethical and acquisitive, as libido and superego, as artist and functionary—Beckett leaves them plastic to all these dualisms, and to many others. (p. 100)

Molloy is … a novel which reaches its climax in a desert flowering—a triumph of the liberated imagination, as in 19th-century novels. It is able to do this because it starts Moran in an almost Dickensian far-back. Molloy, who starts much farther out, does not get so far…. The two pieces of the novel, which are easily separable, would make a wholly different book if their order were reversed; thinking of it that way may make us feel that Moran's victory is only the Pyrrhic one of having fitted himself to advance faster and with fewer impediments toward the grisly end which stares Molloy in the face. (p. 102)

The novelty of Malone Dies lies, I think, in a systematic derangement of the narrative for which there doesn't seem to be much precedent, in Joyce or elsewhere. Malone, for example, begins his narration in a hospital bed from which he is scarcely capable of stirring; when he drops his pencil and notebook, he has to spend several days groping with a stick to recover them. Yet "much later" he comes to again "in a kind of asylum," and registers the kind of surprise at this development which implies that he hasn't been in asylum all along…. These and other absurdities of similar nature are cracks and incongruities in the physical texture of the story, designed, one supposes, to discredit the story as a mock-reality. They are not the product of a hallucinated vision (psychological, that is), nor are they puzzles planted in the fiction for the reader to decipher like a docile, clever schoolboy. They are not, in that sense, structural. They are a product of the history of the English novel, a history which Beckett was in process of shedding—as inevitable a product as that superb sentence of Malone's, at the climax of his description of the asylum: "A stream at long intervals bestrid—but to hell with all this fucking scenery." All the way through Malone Dies one can feel the impatience of an author itching to discard the simulacra of fiction, to be rid of that code of meaning and artifice of economy by which fictions are bound to regulate themselves.

The Unnamable takes the full plunge, sweeping aside the whole gallery of Beckett "characters" and their stories, as mere "mannikins" and "a ponderous chronicle of moribunds." Not without some disgust, the author must push these away to replace them, as fictional characters, with himself, who in addition to being Samuel Beckett in person is noman and everyman, nowhere and everywhere, timeless and yet submerged in the stream of time…. Though he may be unnamable now (we cannot be sure the title applies to him, it may also apply to the process he is trying to define, conventionally and corruptly known as human life), the speaker of the book has had various names, Mahood most recently, perhaps Basil before that, and Worm even before that; he obviously faces a serious prospect of being Worm again very shortly. His meditation is on first and last things in an effort to define what is or should be the quality of his existence as Mahood; the pun on "manhood" is not very remote, and is surely intended to be felt. It is a meditation, remorselessly monotonous and persistent, on a single aspect of the human condition; it proceeds on the unspoken assumption that to define self it is necessary to strip away externals and accidents…. Beckett's working out of this paradox has few of the characteristics of fiction. There is no action, no contrast of motives, no manipulation of sympathy, no "rendering" in the Jamesian sense. Though it implies sustained and serious thought, and imitates the processes of thought, the stream of monologue is more like worry than thought, a ceaseless shaking and gnawing and teasing of the question, what is it to be a man?

Like the Wake, The Unnamable has to be read slowly and with painful concentration on each sentence; skimmed across, it yields chiefly a sense of endlessly reiterated, musclebound depression. But read slowly and questioningly—preferably with the French original close to hand—it yields an enormous sense of imaginative vitality struggling under crushing pressure. (pp. 103-05)

Beckett in propria persona claims to hear voices and to recite in his books words spoken by outside agents. Within The Unnamable these voices make some sense as the voices of the past, of history, or of conventional moralizing. In one very moving series of metaphors they are teachers, badgering the backward student Mahood to recite a rote definition of man that he cannot get through his head. Indeed, it wouldn't be hard to see them as the structure, not only of society but of "systematic" thought and "formal" language, such as the narrator is struggling to use against itself, in the forlorn hope of cutting it short. They are the rags, not only of respectability but of conventional categories, all of which must be stripped off if we are to see unaccommodated man (the allusion is trite but inescapable) as the poor bare forked animal he is.

By contrast with the vaudeville turns of Murphy and Watt, the language of The Unnamable is taut, stripped, and very limited in vocabulary. There is an occasional freaky bit of theological pedantry or anatomical specificity; in his Ali Baba incarnation, the narrator blurs the proprietress of his bistro by calling her now Marguerite and now Madeleine; but his uncertainties lie deeper than those of perception, and he focuses on them myopically, monomaniacally, struggling to the end of the book to say himself, to be said. In these closing passages the counters get fewer and more familiar, the moves are shorter and bump more abruptly into their own contradictions, the transitions blur, and the pace quickens, as the prose seems to slide irresistibly under its own momentum toward the last, utterly simple, impasse. It is a supreme imaginative achievement. (p. 106)

The given from which Beckett scarcely wavers is the dilemma of post-Cartesian philosophy; if the only evidence of being is thinking, and thinking is largely conditioned, no man can know who he is or that he is, save by a ruthless process of pulling down and putting off…. [The] path of approach—indirect, hesitant, and beset with false steps—suggests how hard Beckett found it to reach the center of his subject. In this sense, The Unnamable validates the entire previous career; if it is not a supremely difficult achievement superbly accomplished, then the entire discussion of Beckett as a literary artist moves down several pegs. I think that step will not be necessary.

A narrower vision, a different focus, a much more limited and less symphonic art, were first conditions of Beckett's liberation from Joyce. One consequence of these choices … is a kind of instability of tone and uncertainty of taste that draws him, from time to time, into two different eccentricities where it's neither easy nor rewarding to follow him. One is self-pity and self-dramatization, the other a kind of mechanical testing of the written language by depriving it progressively, and arbitrarily, of its resources. (p. 107)

[A] second fault is illustrated by Beckett's one major fiction since the trilogy, How It Is…. The problems which this narrative poses itself, in the form of deliberate deprivations, are so massive that they overwhelm anything that can be achieved within their limits. Throughout the book the unnamed speaker grovels and gropes aimlessly, face down in icy mud; he speaks only in gasps and broken ejaculations, dispensing entirely with punctuation and often with syntax…. A monotony of pain has seldom been rendered so monotonously or so painfully. The language of How It Is, like the landscapes inner and outer, is scrupulously drab—literal, flat, and repetitious, with only a rare indulgence in nuance or rhythmic subtlety. One can't fail to stand in awe of the artistic integrity that brought Beckett to this dark, dead pocket of imaginative prose, while still feeling that in the course of assassinating the novel—an avowed aim—he has killed a good deal else. (pp. 108-09)

It's the irregular in-and-out of this motion, the alternation of anguish with a vacancy which is particularly effective and possible onstage, that gives Beckett's plays their agonizing rhythm…. As a writer for the stage, Beckett not only owes little that is distinctive to Joyce, he is far and away superior, primarily because of his extraordinary gift for interweaving the rhythms of speech and action…. The schism that Beckett underwent when he divided himself into dramatist and narrator must have been quite as important to his development as his passage from French to English.

Underlying all these formal considerations is a matter which is not very easy to talk about, but which any reader of Beckett's oeuvre can hardly avoid sensing—I mean the presence of a quality which, for lack of a better word, can be called the sacred. Beckett himself does not try to represent directly this condition. (In Molloy, there is a use or two of "azur," Mallarmé's sacred word; but it disappears in the translation, and is never used, systematically or otherwise, thereafter.) His nasty, disintegrating, foul-mouthed old men do not appear likely candidates for canonization, and in fact they do not so much contain the sacred as stand (or crawl or creep) in its presence. Through their rage, their impatience, their compulsion to make and destroy formulas, we sense something that moves them far beyond the prudent accommodations of the here and now. They are willing to shred the world and themselves into little pieces if only they can understand before they die what it has meant to be a human being. This quality, at which one can only gesture inadequately with words like "sacred," is wholly unrelated to ecclesiasticism or any sense of reverence for the divinity—who, to the Beckett spokesmen, often seems like the cruel perpetrator of a set of inhuman practical jokes. There is no sense of awe or hush in Beckett's approach to the sacred, no strained spiritual effort, no talk of the soul or patter about its dark night, via negativa, and so forth and so on. Beckett's saints are do-it-yourselfers. They have a healthy sense of reluctance about the saintly vocation; they spit and snarl, they try to shirk and evade their responsibilities. But by incessantly adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing the meager quantum of their thoughts, they bring themselves into the presence of, or at least very close to, the pure, informulable, minimal essence of being—close enough so that its radiance is felt. Admittedly, this is not "the sacred" in the sense of "the other-worldly," but it is quite as remote from the easy quotidian as the old "sacred" used to be; and alongside its pains, palaver like Joyce's youthful talk of "epiphanies," and the Shelleyan ecstasies of Stephen Dedalus, start to sound pretentious and inauthentic. I speak here only of the youthful Joyce. At the height of their achievement both Joyce and Beckett bring us into the presence of a direct vision, beyond the genres of tragedy and comedy, from which most of the screen elements of traditional fiction, such as "action," "characterization," and "rendering," have dropped away. They are replaced by a silent mutual enfolding, a perception of, if not contact with, oneness of being—congruent structures of mind, mood, and cosmos effortlessly flowing into one another. Probably Beckett does not carry this vision further than Joyce; but he pursues its traces more single-mindedly, perhaps because he doubts it more deeply.

Seen as a spiritual activity which reaches through art to some sort of ultimate, however defined, Beckett's writing is inevitably self-destructive—that is, it uses literature, and uses it up, in the service of an imperative which lies beyond words arranged to produce effects. Having found, essentially in the trilogy, the path to his end, Beckett in his later writings has been chiefly concerned with shortening it. (pp. 109-12)

Beckett's vision is the last step this side of Zen, and his absurdity serves the same end as Zen-absurdity, to open cracks in the texture of things for the vision to shine through. Joyce is an artist of transparency, Beckett of these cracks and grotesque disparities. But the fact of vision, hard as that concept is to define or illustrate, is the main element uniting Beckett with Joyce. Beckett is the chief post-Joycean novelist to throw away his predecessor's machinery and concentrate on the attempt at vision…. Quietism is Beckett's end, and his vision flowers out of a deep, contemplative quiet.

The concepts of ending and finality fascinate Beckett; his books are all studies of terminal cases under indefinite reprieve; and anyone who cites him as a special instance of Joycean influence has to face the possibility that he represents the last closed doorway in that cul-de-sac down which Joyce is said to have led the English novel. He is, in effect, the promised end…. He works only at the very highest pitch, using minimal materials and aiming at a very narrow range of effects; the sense that he is squeezing the last meager drops from a very dry sponge is the consequence of a deliberate artistic decision, not of The Decline of the West. His endings, long threatened and desperately struggled against, are generally equivocal when they arrive, because to say the last word on man is impossible, however grim his condition. (Zeno's paradox has a special application here: if the last word can be said, somebody must exist to say it, about whom at least one further thing can be said.) As he passionately refuses formulas for himself, so it seems misleading or worse to encapsulate Beckett in a formula. He has kept open the possibilities of humanity by cutting the throat of literature and forcing his readers to confront naked conditions of mere existence—without sham exhilaration or despair, but coldly, very coldly. (pp. 112-13)

Robert Martin Adams, "Samuel Beckett," in his AfterJoyce: Studies in Fiction After "Ulysses" (copyright © 1977 by Robert Martin Adams; used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.), Oxford University Press, New York, 1977, pp. 90-113.