[From] his earliest prose Beckett gives himself a persona, a personal representative whom he can know and probe as cosa mentale, yet he presents him at first as engaged in the non-existent external world, and his resource must then be to show the connexion as grotesque, so that the character alternately attempts it and withdraws from it, in burlesque indecision: this is what we may call the Belacqua phase of Beckett.

More Pricks than Kicks (1934) is (as might be guessed from its obscene though unassuming title) marked and annulled by the author's frantic self-consciousness: in these short stories Beckett is never done with torturing the language, which constantly approximates to fine writing and is constantly brought back to the level of jest or parody. The persona here is Belacqua, a character taken straight from Canto IV of the Purgatorio, where Dante sees him as 'more idle than if laziness itself were his sister'. In Dante's poem Belacqua is found among those souls who out of sheer sloth have always postponed repentance in their mortal life, and who are condemned to wait for their admission to Purgatory for a period equivalent to that of their stay on earth. Here we surely have a foretaste of Waiting for Godot. But it is worth noting that while for Dante's Belacqua 'waiting' is a period of expectancy and looking forward, for Beckett's it is a completely negative experience. At any rate in this character Beckett incarnates for the first time his wish for the physical, sentimental and mental immobility that should lead to a near-mystic quiet: such a state is in conflict with the pull of the world, represented by the obstinacy of desire, essentially sexual, and by the insistence of women. (p. 7)

Let us make a proposition: that the subject of each of Beckett's novels is exactly and entirely in its title, and that each represents an avatar of Beckett, who knows that he only exists and signifies to himself. We shall then admit that everything in Watt [1953] deals with aspects of Watt, including Mr Knott. A god-image, yes, of course: Knot, nought, Gott. (p. 13)

As Beckett sets his figures, before us whether Watt or Knott, a certain quite deliberate element of freedom and gratuitousness goes to their ornament and gives them a presence….

[Watt] leans heavily on a philosophical system which it half follows, half mocks and parodies, that of Leibnitz. Mr Knott as keystone of a Leibnitzian world may represent, in opposition to the single actuality effectively retained, the infinite number of possibles held in reserve: this is an idea on which the whole book thrives, since it contains page after page of enumerations arranged with incredible care and precision, of exhaustive and, some readers will say, exhausting series, making … a prose of numbers constructed like silent music. (p. 14)

Beckett's art had become in time more and more of a projection of images generated by his inner pressures; in other words it had become more and more expressionist because more and more oneiric; and because, in its externalizations, it ignored the external world. Intenseness, aggressiveness, violence, as they are the motive force of the artist, will remain part of the art, leading to the distortion of whatever shapes it borrows, and to vehement incoherence in their disposition. Such an art is ever strongly dramatic: the dialectic of conflict and the clash of assertion and denial in The Unnamable are strikingly so. Beckett has already turned to the stage.

What stage? As we watch Waiting for Godot (1952) we know at once that this avant-garde play is closely related to the popular vision of the old music hall or circus, or the early comic cinema of Mack Sennett. The potent attraction of the piece comes from the association of this comic vision, medium, technique, and the bitterness of the message: persistence, knowing itself hopeless; resistance to disintegration, aware of its absurdity. The art to convey this could be termed philosophical clowning. But is not clowning the philosophical essence of parody? Beckett assumes the whole tradition of such art from Shakespeare on. In it the clown debunks, demolishes his 'betters' and destroys all values because all values, once fixed, are false…. He ridicules action, patiently going about it with minute care, contriving his failures and tumbles until he reaches ultimate success as an anticlimax. Act Without Words I and II [1960] are perfect clowning: in the second, the two clowns come out of their sacks, go through the day's work and back into the sacks, in possibly ten minutes. One is brisk and active and does a lot of things in quick time. The other is sluggish, uninterested, indolent as Belacqua himself, and achieves very little. But when they are back in their sacks, after killing exactly as much time, the way they killed it makes no difference. Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot seem to be outside any definition of clowning; perhaps we should be content with calling them clownish actors, but they do an act rather than play a part. In fact, Beckett has been careful to insert enough farce to discourage pathos in spite of the pathetic elements in the text. Thus the pulling off of a stubborn boot, the horse-play with Lucky, and the kicks and howls and the tumbling of all the characters in a heap, and the juggling interlude (with a probably unconscious Laurel and Hardy origin) involving two heads and three hats, are carefully inserted with a dual purpose: such amusements that pass the time must be felt as representing the inanity of all active 'diversions', truly so called, so felt, ever since Murphy tried to reach mystic unity. Moreover, aesthetically speaking, clownish clothes and clownish acting are part of the rejection of all realism. A realistic setting would spoil everything. We do not mean only scenery but, even if marked in the most sketchy and symbolic manner, a precise and external localization of the setting. In Waiting for Godot, the stage (allegedly 'a country road, a tree') is in fact all the world and a stage, of which the players show their awareness in their mocking dialogue…. (pp. 28-30)

Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Each one of us, as long as he has something to expect, can insert Godot as the unknown factor or providential visitor. But Godot is he who never comes, a Kafkaesque vision again. He has sent a 'messenger' …, only to say that he won't come that day but the next; on the second day, the message is to the same effect, but the Messenger destroys all hope of a real connexion by asserting that he has never come before. Vladimir and Estragon are not known, nor ever will be. Esse est percipi, and Beckett's characters will feel more and more inexistent because unperceived.

Godot of the divine undertones does not come, but in a Manichean world, Pozzo does: a mean man-devil, with his slave and carrier, Lucky, whom he drives like an animal, by rope and whip. Lucky and Pozzo, abject slave and cruel bully, seem almost to sum up human relations, as How It Is will again set them forth. Yet Vladimir and Estragon show, with attraction and repulsion significantly alternating, a more equal relation between two desperate solitudes, with a note of elder brother protection on one side (Vladimir) and sullen rebelliousness on the other (Estragon). The games of friendship help pass the time like other vital illusions, such as the leafless tree being found in sudden leaf.

'Waiting', the seemingly endless, fruitless, meaningless waiting, points to the heavy anguish of time which dominates the play as an image of life. Pozzo himself, the tyrant gone helplessly blind on the second day, sums up the nullity of time and of life-in-time … 'one day we were born, one day we'll die, the same day, the same second … They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more …'.

Blind Pozzo now jerks Lucky's rope: 'On!', surely, thus situated, the most dramatic word in the play, and which sums up the heroic absurdity of mankind.

Much has been said of the theological implications of the play, which are almost too obvious. Their purport is another matter. There is nothing here except the author's images, cosa mentale. So we can only speak of theological images, and pass on from one more 'mythology'. (pp. 30-1)

For Samuel Beckett 1956 was the year of a decisive and unexpected turning. Since to him language was the symbol of all impositions of the social over the individual, the most social form of language, that of the newspaper, of advertising, of the media, was held in special horror. Yet when he was asked to write a radio play for the BBC he realized that he was entering a world of singular power, the world of sounds, which he could adapt to his expressive ends by practising a preliminary dissociation of the senses. All that Fall (1957) brings to us this language and renders, through it, in a vein of broad Joycean humour, the animation of an Irish road and a small Irish station. Sounds create visual images, while the visual image would not expand into sound. The enormous bulk of Mrs Rooney is conveyed by the 'sound of efforts' when she is pushed into the car better than it could be by any padded actress. Moreover, language as language is given its chance by being presented strongly to the ear as a significant fabric of words. This covers, perhaps to some extent hides, the power of the play, which is tied to the character of blind Mr Rooney. While listening-in to the play we are functionally blind; but his blindness, which we seem to parallel, is in fact in strong contrast: sinister negation, madness, and crime perhaps; it becomes our mystery, the absurd death of a child connects, again audibly, with a sermon on God's support for all that fall, and with Schubert's music to the song 'Death and the Maiden'.

All that Fall provides lively, ambiguous, suggestive prose. Embers (1959), by contrast, is a sombre poem of an old man haunted by what he wants to hear and what he has to hear of his past, obsessive moments connected with his child or his wife, memories of his drowned father brought by the noise of the sea, alternating with a story which, like almost every protagonist of Beckett's, he is telling himself. Whatever has happened in All that Fall, the dialogue in itself is not dramatic. Henry's monologue in Embers is fantastically so: its inner tensions are revealed in true expressionist style by the hallucinations which they bring before us, as the inner and external worlds intermingle. The ghostly sounds of hooves or of a piano lesson (connected with the miseries of his little daughter's education), which his miserable witchcraft has summoned to his ear, and which come vividly to ours from the dimension of nightmares, blend with the voice of his wife, who of course might be present, but who is probably part of the past, for only his feet audibly disturb the shingle. This is a rare and moving masterpiece.

Krapp's Last Tape (1958) is a short stage play. Yet it connects with the radio and television plays, while it fulfils the idea put forward in How It Is, of disposing the sequences of a piece not chronologically but according to the most expressive arrangement. Krapp is the last of Beckett's clowns and since Beckett's particular mode of distancing insists on the character being a clown playing a part, it is a pity that some recent productions have ignored the white face and red nose, the 'rusty black narrow trousers, too short', the 'surprising pair of dirty white boots, size 10 at least, very narrow and pointed', with the grotesque nearsighted peerings to match, and the ways of a habitual drunkard. This singular object will, by his own seeking, be confronted by mirror-images of his past self made present: fragments of his own tape-recordings. He can listen to himself again—'again' is a drug-like word for him—living though some capital scenes, the death of his mother, and a love scene, the unhappy issue of which must have been the beginning of his self-destruction. He measures the change from the lower depth of his present decay, appreciates with bitter chuckles the absurdity of this Belacqua past, of his grotesque attempts to live and love; yet the attraction of that external memory is such that he has to come back again to the failed love affair, the girl, the boat on the sedgy lake. The mood, sarcastic, contemptuous, fascinated, and the process, are obviously to be set beside Embers. (pp. 34-5)

Eh Joe (1966) brings before us a guilty soul hunted down, detected and tormented by light and sound. A voice, which would seem to be external although it belongs to no visible body, a woman's voice mercilessly recalls his miserable meanness, and how it brought a girl, almost a child, to kill herself. As the voice in bouts carries on its task, the camera takes it up in relays, advancing methodically on its helpless victim. Beckett, whose imagination is passionately technical, adjusts seconds to inches in this alternate association of movement and sound, with the fiendish precision of a thriller. There were a few hints in Happy Days of Winnie's need to be perceived. The esse est percipi theme had become for Beckett more and more engrossing; from Play marginally, from Film and from Eh Joe fully, it will be obvious that to be an object of perception is alternately desirable (Mahood's man in the jar thought that if he was noticed by some passer-by it would prove that he had lived) and also the crowning horror. (p. 38)

Beckett's evolution—instead of literary evolution one is tempted to say evolution from literature—has been heroic and exemplary. The author of More Pricks than Kicks and even perhaps of Murphy, with his great gifts of wit, verbal invention and brilliant narrative, his buffooning, his mixture of aggressive satire and sensitive, poetic perceptiveness, might have developed into a, let us say an Anthony Burgess—if we must have a name in the Joycean affiliation—had he been at all pleased with himself. But in his imagination a sombre demand that absolute truth, which I will not call metaphysical if I can help, must prevail over aesthetic requirements, made him dissatisfied with all contingencies. Moreover the fact of being cornered into life, as his Protestant vision saw it, became, since he was a writer, being cornered into writing. The impulse to write, which had to be writing of something, and referred to the external world, was promoted to a form of doom, and became for a while the centre of a mythology of damining judges. When they were gone they left the emptiness of utter solitude, and he felt that all his writing should be of his own personal condition turned into symbolical, expressionist constructions. If writing was not an end, there should be an end of writing as soon as its work was done. But it never was done. Hence the dissatisfaction and the abrupt turnings. Hence finally no more novels, no more stories, hardly any plays or playlets, but in the last few years, superb, recondite, difficult poetic texts in French, a few pages long, which we may distinguish, from the prevailing mood, as visions and fables. Perhaps only lack of perception in this reader prevents the visions from being seen also as fables.

The most impressive of the visions may be Sans, or Lessness (1969) An unguided reading is enough to convince the reader of the strange, subdued lyrical beauty of this journey to one more refuge which is now ruins, an inner landscape of compelling grandeur. But a French critic in the author's confidence has shown how the sixty sentences of which the twenty-four verse-like units are made up are rigorously structured, word by word and very literally combined and composed, as is music in its notes and phrases…. (pp. 40-1)

In an age of tragic uncertainties Beckett has brought together in a solid mass all the uncertainties and has made a black world of powerful symbols out of them. He is contemporary with existentialist pessimism, and he has turned into a coherent system of images a sense of dereliction that is very widespread. His way of dealing with it was unorthodox: instead of creating order out of disorder, form out of the formless, as Joyce did to T. S. Eliot's satisfaction in Ulysses, he has created an exploded form to reflect an exploded world. When nothing was left, he stood facing his own visions; by a curious and perhaps significant coincidence, to a world that was ceasing to be interested in anything but pattern and structure, he offered compact gems of pattern and structure, words used as pure tones in abstract arrangements. (pp. 42-3)

His efforts to suppress in himself the will-to-art with the will-to-joy were very conscious, and only moderately successful: he had been born a poet, a man of images and of song, and one could cull out of his writing, almost to the last, snatches of brilliantly worded imaginings. They were largely suppressed because they hinted at desperate sympathies for whatever was small, frail, forsaken, suffering, and might some day be constructed into self-pity. The keen ear goes on listening in spite of all to the little music of life, and echoing it. There is a long tender elegy dispersed under the crude, fierce, gross surface. There is also, as if we had here a parallel to Rimbaud's dual mood, a power of heroic vision that joins in spans of fantastic imagery the coenesthesia to the Universe. In our time only William Golding, I think, gives some approximation of such power of language. The miracle is that Beckett can do it in two languages, and, I think, with more musical subtlety in the French. (p. 43)