Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is now considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

'Murphy', Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish a home and to amass sufficient fortune for his intended bride to join him.

The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner. Contents: Waiting for Godot. Endgame. Happy Days. All That Fall. Acts Without Words. Krapp's Last Tape. Roughs for the Theatre. Embers. Roughs for the Radio. Words and Music. Cascando. Play. Film. The Old Tune. Come and Go. Eh Joe. Breath. Not I. That Time. Footfalls. Ghost Trio ...but the clouds.... A Piece of Monologue. Rockaby. Ohio Impromptu. Quad. Catastrophe. Nacht und Traume. What Where.

A seminal work of twentieth century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone or something named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell (abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a narrator lying in the dark, in the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered - or remembered - by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or beyond. Together with Molloy, How It Is counts for many readers as Beckett's greatest accomplishment in the novel form. It is also his most challenging narrative, both stylistically and for the pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced circumstance, of another life before the present, and the self-appraising search for an essential self, which were inaugurated in the great prose narratives of his earlier trilogy.

Written and published in French in 1951, and in Samuel Beckett’s English translation in 1956, Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ‘the siege in the room’. ‘Malone’, writes Malone, ‘is what I am called now.’ On his deathbed, whittling away the time with stories and revisions of stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is contradictory and intermittent, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of darker rages than his precursor Molloy. Malone promises silence, but as a storyteller he delivers irresistibly more.

Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt), and two years later by The Unnamable (L’Innommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.

The Unnamable consists entirely of a disjointed monologue from the perspective of an unnamed (presumably unnamable) and immobile protagonist. There is no concrete plot or setting - and whether the other characters ("Mahood" (formerly "Basil") and "Worm") actually exist or whether they are facets of the narrator himself is debatable. The protagonist also claims authorship of the main characters in the two previous novels of the Trilogy and Beckett's earlier novels Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and Watt. The novel is a mix of recollections and existential musings on the part of its narrator, many of which pertain specifically to the possibility that the narrator is constructed by the language he speaks. Other 'characters' (a stretch to call them distinctly different than the narrator) serve as the passive recipient of the dialogue and in many places (as the narrator suggests) the dialogue's genesis. The novel builds in its despairing tone until the ending, which consists mainly of very long run-on sentences. It closes with the phrase "I can't go on, I'll go on," which was later used as the title of an anthology of Beckett works. The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later translated by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.

"Čekajući Godoa" Semjuela Beketa (1906-1989) je drama koja predstavlja prazninu, čekanje kao praznu radnju. Ne drama koja čehovljevski govori o praznini, nego sama jeste praznina, odsustvo radnje i uobičajene smisaone poruke iz drame. Pošto je čekanje prazna radnja, nemogućnost da se napiše drama čekanja izražava samu sebe. Bujicom reči ni o čemu, nizom malih radnji bez povezanosti i, u krajnjoj liniji, bez smisla, drama popunjava prazni prostor i tako ga negativno najavljuje, ali istovremeno i svedoči o sebi time što se iznutra, sama u sebi smisao no i struktura ne ponavlja, bez objašnjenja (smisaono) i raspleta (strukturno), i time što likovi ostaju neintegrisani u svet drame, komentarišu je i vrednuju spolja, i tako konceptualizuje sopstveni nemogući poduhvat.

Samuel Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller-Theater notebook.Professor Knowlson writes that in these notes 'we see Beckett simplifying, shaping and refining, as he works towards a realization of the play that will function well dramatically. The material reveals a flexibility and openness of approach often considered alien to Beckett's ways of working in the theatre.' The Schiller notebook also contains some of the most explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed.The revised text incorporates many of the changes Beckett made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. Professor Knowlson worked closely with Beckett over these revisions - and deviations from the original are noted and explained in detail.

Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt), and two years later by The Unnamable (L’Innommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.

Remorseless and unnerving, but leavened with black humour and the brilliance of his writing, Beckett's work is some of the most important and distinctive of the last century. In these two stories, the pains of companionship, and of loneliness and of the human body are starkly explored.

In 'Happy Days, ' Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, to time past and time present.

In the first of these two plays, an old man records his comments as he listens to a tape recording of his own observations on how life felt when he was 39. In the second, a man walking along the seashore recalls his dead father while other familiar voices speak to him from the past.