[In] contrast to the progression of Joyce's oeuvre, where each new work appeared more exhaustive and revolutionary than its predecessors, Beckett came to offer a modern regression. His career, as it developed, actually seemed to reverse the traditional picture of artistic development. Each new work of Beckett's shrank in length; minimal plot, social setting and characterization became yet more minimal. The logical point of termination began to look like silence, the pure blank page. This was the meaning of Beckett for many in the 1960s. But from the viewpoint of 1970s the perspective is quite different. The myth of regression has collapsed. In retrospect we can see how the apparent dead-ends of Beckett's career are simply staging posts for new ventures. We now get an image of the writer as a free man making artistic decisions, rather than as a metaphysician trapped in the coils of an immutable aesthetic logic. And, as the perspectives change, the question that now arises is whether or not Beckett has managed to match the accepted triumphs of his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable…. (pp. 94-5)

Waiting for Godot is the work which we automatically associate with Beckett's name. It remains his most popular and successful play, and, together with the prose trilogy, it forms the central achievement of his career. It seems significant that it took a play to draw public attention to Beckett as a writer. When he switched from English to writing in French, after [World War II], his exile as a writer was complete, yet he remained in obscurity. When he switched from fiction to drama he became an instant international success. The reason why becomes clear, I think, if we compare Waiting for Godot with a slightly earlier work, Mercier and Camier (written 1945). The novel has much in common with the play: two male antagonists enduring a relationship based on an arbitrary accumulation of comic or pathetic non-events. We learn from the first sentence of the novel that Mercier and Camier are on a journey, but its route and destination appear obscure…. Instead of having to wait for an arrival, Mercier and Camier are themselves bent on arriving. Implicitly the journey is life, a pilgrim's progress through absurdity to nowhere except, possibly, the extinction of 'that harmless lunacy', consciousness. Mercier and Camier gives us a fuller, more eventful version of the absurd than Godot, but an equally inconclusive one. Sections of the novel anticipate the flat, ritualistic question and non-answer technique of the play, but most of it is devoted to a parody of the narrative conventions of realism. In comparison with the economy of the play, however, the novel seems to dissipate its comic energy. Waiting for Godot gains a tremendous dramatic tension by setting up the mysterious, tantalizing figure of Godot to overshadow Vladimir and Gogo's anxieties. The two tramps, instantly fleshed-out as individuals the moment they appear on the stage, impose meaning on the emptiness with a desperate comic invention next to which the wit of Mercier and Camier appears flaccid and redundant:

   What are you musing on, Camier?
   On the horror of existence, confusedly, said Mercier.
   What about a drink? said Camier.

There is nothing in the play as easy and indulgent as that; in contrast to it the novel appears as little more than an amusing bag of tricks, exercising Beckett's talents at a much lower level of engagement.

The unevenness of Beckett's career is further evident from First Love (written 1945) and From an Abandoned Work (written 1955), two rather flat, strained shorter pieces, separated in composition by the ten years in which he produced his most enduring work. As such minor works are added to the canon we get a clearer view of the false starts and cul-de-sacs in Beckett's development. (pp. 96-7)

Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956) and The Unnamable (1958)—all originally written in French between 1947 and 1950—continue to form the core of Beckett's postwar achievement in fiction. Unlike his earlier novels, Murphy and Watt, they are narrated in the first person; unlike Mercier and Camier, the centre of attention is the narrator himself. The three novels have a cumulative impact as we gradually learn that Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mahood, Worm and the Unnamable are each reincarnations of the same garrulous voice. At times the voice claims to be taken over by other voices, but on other occasions it asserts that this is simply a fiction. The effect of this is radically to undermine any confident judgements on the reader's part about the reality of the world conveyed by the prose. The vestigial plot of the first part of Molloy—Molloy's desire to 'speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying'—quickly dissolves into a series of uncertain or self-cancelling memories ('It was winter, it must have been winter…. Perhaps it was only autumn'). This technique of immediately negating what has only just been said remains one of Beckett's most consistent and disturbing narrative techniques. In both halves of Molloy, absurdity and ambiguity accumulate within a highly self-conscious circular narrative structure which leads nowhere except to doubt, hesitation, and, finally, the revelation that the second section is a fabrication. Molloy is crammed with materials and techniques designed to shatter the complacency of readers used to more traditional fiction: lyrical expressions of melancholy and despair uncomfortably juxtaposed with jeering outbursts of disgust at human existence; exquisite phrasing which develops into slang and obscenity; pathetic fallacies one moment, anti-romanticism the next; and theological jokes in the Irish comic tradition, which range from simple double entendre to sophisticated encyclopedic wit.

Malone Dies takes us further than Molloy in that it has a very exact point of termination: death, which strikes Malone down in the very act of narrating his last garbled memories and creative fantasies. The narrative structure is superficially different, split into short sections, mostly a page or two in length, one as short as a single verbless sentence; but the comic techniques and the bleak condition being dramatized echo Molloy…. Like Molloy and Moran, Malone is his own literary critic, but with a greater frequency. 'What tedium,' he sighs on each occasion that his imagination begins to run away with him and is seduced into creating a sequence of naturalistic episodes. Malone's weakness in this regard makes him rather more three-dimensional and human than the previous Beckett grotesques, and the author's wit often seems to function at its best when satirizing more traditional areas of novel-writing, as in the marvellous comic image of a house filled with 'multitudes of fine babies … which the parents keep moving about from one place to another, to prevent their forming the habit of motionlessness.'

With The Unnamable all such comforting familiarities are gone. All traces of human landscapes and human situations vanish, and we find ourselves in a hellish void, which contains a voice—a voice which may truthfully be describing the conditions of its anguish and the other voices which appear to possess it, or which may just be living up to its promise of telling stories…. More disturbing than the contents, imaginary or otherwise, of the Unnamable's particular hell, is the unstable narrative point-of-view. The novel metamorphoses into something which resembles a kind of automatic writing, in which the narrator is the medium for a babble of conflicting voices. The Unnamable bulges with a mad medley of styles, tones and voices. Behind the gibbering, schizophrenic pressure of the narrative, one senses Beckett drawing on his previous experience as a nurse in a mental hospital and putting it to use in the most experimental and disturbing of the trilogy's three texts.

L'Innomable was completed in 1950, and Beckett thereafter abandoned full-length fiction for several years, transferring his attention to his playwriting and to the translation of the trilogy into English. His attack on the naturalistic novel seemed both exhaustive and exhausted, and in 1958 Beckett remarked that he believed it was impossible for him to write another novel. The Texts for Nothing, thirteen short pieces written in 1950, are represented as a tranquil afterword to the trilogy, rounding off (with an echo of Sterne) 'its cock-and-bullshit in a coda worthy of the rest.' As a set of variations on well-worn themes, the Texts are not among the more compelling of Beckett's works. An exquisite style is put in the service of a set of self-cancelling statements, but the absence of a specified existential condition leaves the work a clutter of familiar ironic gambits, lacking the coherence of the novels.

Structure, however minimal, makes a welcome reappearance in How It Is, the full-length fiction which Beckett suddenly produced in 1959. Divided into three parts, the work gives us the narrator's gabbled account of how it is 'before Pim with Pim after Pim'. After the spectral hell of The Unnamable the new work plunges us into an earthbound purgatory, through which the narrator crawls, dragging a sack of tinned sardines and a tin-opener. The last item comes in useful when, in a hideous burlesque of human communication which distortedly echoes Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony', he tries to scratch a message in Pim's flesh. Later, the narrator returns to his original breathless solitude, dismissing the skeleton events of the novel as an invention—'never any procession no nor any journey no never any Pim nor any Bom no never anyone no only me'.

The sequence of isolated paragraphs, all of which lack syntax, gives a striking appearance of formal innovation to the novel. On a closer examination, such experimentation offers no significant barrier to an appreciation of the text. The narrative is no incoherent, chaotic babble, but yet another dramatization of a suffering consciousness which manages to formulate its agonies in cool, beautifully cadenced prose. (pp. 97-100)

We inevitably read the text as a linear structure, and follow it as it decomposes, reconstitutes the elements of its plot, and then decomposes them again. This note of perpetual metamorphosis gives us the feel of the narrator's squirming, anguished thoughts, but simultaneously the painfully self-conscious stops and starts ('something wrong there'; 'I recapitulate') evoke the intimacy of an author caught in the act of composing his manuscript.

In Ping (1967) and Lessness (1970) Beckett demonstrates that the process of stripping language down can be taken several stages further. The extreme formalism of these pieces, which juggle a handful of words and phrases in mathematically-exact patterns of symmetry, do yield more meaning under close textual analysis than is at first apparent, but whether or not they repay the effort when the naturalistic base has been so radically pruned away remains debatable. However, the apparently diminishing curve of Beckett's career took a sharp change of direction away from the pursuit of minimalism with the appearance of The Lost Ones (1972), which marks a return to a more conventional fictional form, complete with sentences, syntax and a stable, even humanized, third-person narrative. The novella portrays a miniature society of two hundred men and women on the brink of extinction. Inside a mysterious cylinder these dehumanized figures engage in an endless, futile circulation, each searching for its lost one, each haunted by the belief that an exit somewhere exists. The narrator speaks wistfully and pityingly of these doomed and pathetic people; the tone is muted, resigned, compassionate, only rarely broken by comic interjections. The Lost Ones is Beckett's most allegorical work, but as a vision of the absurdity of human existence it seems stale and secondhand, lacking the compelling power of Kafka's short fiction.

The title of Beckett's latest work, For To End Yet Again, and Other Fizzles (1976) is oddly defensive. Its shrugging mock modesty touches that recurring note of contempt, both for literature and for readers, which occasionally erupts through the surface of the writer's prose…. For To End Yet Again shows him keeping his options open: the title story presents, in the style of The Lost Ones, the end of a journey in a featureless desert and the last glimmerings of consciousness, whereas 'Horn Came Always' takes us back to the world of Molloy…. 'Afar a Bird' and 'I Gave Up Before Birth' offer brief, linked extensions of a theme which runs through both The Unnamable and How It Is—that of the hapless narrator musing on the identity of his creator, but threatening to reverse the old slave/master relationship, and offering a dark vision of the author sliding into senility.

The theme of death and last things, at the heart of much of the younger writer's work, inevitably takes on a new edge for a writer in his seventies; and if For To End Yet Again shows Beckett casting a retrospective eye over his oeuvre and touching it up here and there, it also discloses a growing exploitation of his own legend as subject matter for new texts. The fiction since How It Is has largely avoided extreme self-consciousness and formal innovation; and For To End Yet Again suggests a graceful rehearsal of new work as much as a valedictory to the old. But Beckett's career still seems to lack a major fiction to equal what he achieved in the late 1940s; whether or not the variety to be found in the new collection expresses self-confidence or aesthetic uncertainty remains for the future to reveal. (pp. 100-02)