The setting of almost all of Samuel Beckett's work is that of Krapp's Last Tape, written in 1958: "A late evening in the future." The future is not a place, and not much of a time; it is a guess, a possibility, a threat. We may say it is in the head, and that is where Beckett's characters often think they are: in an "imaginary head," an "abandoned head"; "we are needless to say in a skull"; "perhaps we're in a head, it's as dark as in a head before the worms get at it, ivory dungeon." But the head in this meaning is not a place either. It is a metaphor, a spatialization of the unseeable mind, and it is important not to be taken in by the familiarity of the figure….

Another name, another metaphor for this nonplace is limbo, the home of "those nor for God nor, for his enemies," as Beckett puts it, quoting Dante. But Beckett's fictional universe is a limbo not because of the neutrality of its inhabitants (although this may well be part of Beckett's strict judgment on himself), but because it is imagined and knows itself to be imagined. It is a domain just off the edge of life, late in the future, an ending order peopled by decaying or immobile creatures who lose the use of their limbs the way others lose their car keys….

And yet, in spite of appearances, a good deal of mimesis remains in Beckett. However broken or derelict, schematic, unlikely or cruel, a world is being imagined or remembered or both, and then imitated in words. It is because it is a writer's world, alterable by a flick of the pen, that it seems so airless and arbitrary…. It is because the writer himself seems more often than not to be at the mercy of the images that present themselves to him that it also has the feel of an observed or described world. "Perhaps I invented him," Moran says of Molloy, "I mean found him ready-made in my head."

This world, implicitly or explicitly figurative, persists in Beckett's work, a rickety or fragmentary externalization of the reason-ridden consciousness. But over the years, this world has become less immediately recognizable, less of a shared world, and less likely to generate characters and stories. Belacqua, in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), inhabits a historical Dublin, complete with pubs, place names, and Malahide murderer; Murphy, in the novel of that name (1938), sits in a mews in West Brompton. The Landscapes of Watt (1953) and the Trilogy are scarcely realistic, but resemble our world in striking ways and can be reached from it: Malone has been to London and Moran mentions Goering….

In most of the later prose—Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ping (1966), Lessness (1969), The Lost Ones (1971), For to End Yet Again (1976)—there are no characters, only closely watched creatures, and no stories, only stark images, obsessively focused and refocused. The scene is still a world, but now less than "just a life," it is the depleted imagination and its meager contents…. Life dies, and then the imagination, the one that deals in islands, water, azure, and verdure. But even then something remains, imagination's ghost or residue, the indefatigable spook of the writer, who cannot not see things, and who cannot give up trying to arrange in words what he sees….

The best of Beckett's recent fiction returns again and again to the spectral visions of what he calls "dead imagining." (p. 49)

Of the pieces in Rockaby, All Strange Away is interesting for what it promises, and for the sight it offers of the writer in the workshop of his mind. But it is not as concentrated or as memorable as several of the later prose texts. The other pieces in Rockaby are even slighter. The title work is a brief play, almost a poem, in which a prematurely aged woman sits in a rocking chair and listens to her own recorded voice telling her how she gave up her quest for a creature companion—"another like herself / another creature like herself / a little like"—and progressively withdrew from her walks, from her window, from her upstairs room, to die in her rocker, saying to herself, "Done with that" and to her rocker, "Fuck life."

"Ohio Impromptu" is another short play, presenting two white-haired, long-coated figures sitting at a table, one reading to the other. The book being read from tells of a lost love, and of a man sent by the absent woman to read again and again to her lover, until "the sad tale" is told for the last time, and reader and listener, in the book and on the stage, sit "as though turned to stone."

"A Piece of Monologue" is what it says it is. A man stands on stage wearing a white nightgown and white socks and tells of a man in a room, facing the window, then facing the walls. "Birth was the death of him," the speaker begins, and recounts the man's muffled memories and the fading of the light.

There is an acute sense of loss in these plays, and a doubling of the self in memory, represented by a separated voice or a book or a narrator. All of them are spare and graceful and eloquent. But they look like exercises, theatrical variations on themes by Poe and Beckett himself. The material is perhaps too possible for Beckett. "Let them ask the impossible, I don't mind that," the Unnamable said, "what else could they ask of me?"

Company, on the other hand, is what we might call a major work if Beckett had not taught us to mistrust such terms, his most important work perhaps, if that dubious adjective is allowed, since How It Is (1961), and a good deal more accessible than that oblique and violent text. (pp. 49-50)

At first sight it appears to continue the vein of All Strange Away. It situates a figure in space and watches him, flat out and immobile except for the opening and closing of his eyes. But it returns us as well to the worlds of The Unnamable and Malone Dies and Molloy, since a voice speaks to the prostrate figure, offering him a past, a sheaf of memories it insists are his own….

Beckett has often spoken of his characters as company for each other—in The Unnamable, in How It Is, in Texts for Nothing—but never with this tone of amused helplessness, with this sense of solitude longing for an inconceivable Dickensian jollity: "The test is company. Which of the two darks is the better company. Which of all imaginable positions has the most to offer in the way of company." Company, in this rather old-fashioned usage, suggests not conglomerates but polite visits, teatimes, a cosy Victorian parlor, as in to receive company.

The fact that there is no company here, that the prostrate figure doesn't speak, that he can't or won't acknowledge the past proposed to him as his own, plunges the text into unrelieved gloom at the end. But the work as a whole, like all of Beckett's best writing, is made up of gloom and irony, and a note of bravery sounds throughout the narrative. Writing is a mode of hiding for the writer; hiding while seeming to be seen. "Quick leave him." The writer can no more admit his actual presence than the silent figure can lay claim to his past. But he can admit the absurdity of his unmanageable activity, take his textual tumbles, and laugh at his narrative scrapes.

The memories presented to the figure in the dark are another strand in the text. They are highly personal and appear in several cases to be autobiographical, Beckett's own. (p. 50)

These memories are sharply realized, stripped of all nostalgia, and ultimately unowned. They cannot be claimed by the figure in the darkness, because he, like the woman in Rockaby, like Molloy, Moran, Malone, and a number of other Beckett characters, has withdrawn from his dwindling world and life. They do not, in this context, properly belong to Beckett; and still less to us. Beckett's art here turns into something like the excruciating reverse of Proust's. Time is not recaptured, it is held up at an immeasurable distance, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. We perceive it so clearly because we can't have it back. Beckett consigns his character to solitude, and himself and us to "labor lost and silence." And yet the writing remains, a conquest not of time but of the pain of memory, and the cruelty of a dead but unforgiving imagination. (p. 51)