Life and Work of Samuel Beckett - Research Paper Example

Research paper on Samuel Beckett Insert Insert Grade Insert 10 April Outline Introduction Early life Beckett’s work Beckett’s life and relationships Beckett’s career themes Conclusion INTRODUCTION For over 3 centuries, Dublin has been known for producing numerous expressive playwrights such as those of Oscar Wilde, S. O’Casey, R.S. Sheridan, J.B. Shaw, J.M. Synge amongst others (Uhlmann 20). It is, therefore, not a wonder to note that Samuel Beckett, a person considered to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th Century, was born in this specific city. Even more interesting is the fact that he was also born on a Good Friday, April 13, in the year 1906 (Connor 51). His birth date brought about a mystical symbolism into his writings as well as personal life. Samuel Beckett was born and raised in a Protestant middle class home and was the son of Bill Beckett, a Quantity Surveyor and May Beckett, a Nurse (Cronin 72). At the age of 14, his parents sent him off to school which was apparently also attended by Oscar Wilde. A few years later, Beckett moved to Paris and without more ado, fell in love with the city. Upon arrival, a mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce who was a writer (Nixon 91). Having been introduced to the world of writing, Beckett wrote his very first essay at the age of 23 which was in defense of Joyce’s magnum piece against the public’s lazy demand for easy understanding (Knowlson 110). However, upon completing a study of Proust, Beckett concluded that routine and habit are the cancer of time and this led to him having some considerations regarding his life. France became the strongest factor that was to influence his spirit and style of his writings. He later gave up his post at Trinity College where he received his B.A. Degree, and embarked on a nomadic journey across Europe. As he travelled across Europe, Beckett still wrote poems and stories while doing odd jobs to get some form of income. He finally settled down in Paris in the year 1937 after being to Germany, Ireland, England and other parts of Europe. In a rather unfortunate incident, soon after he arrived in Paris, he was stabbed in the street by a man who had asked him for money (Uhlmann 21). While in hospital, Beckett learned that he had developed a perforated lung. Beckett recovered and decided to visit his attacker in prison to question him on the attack. In the course of the World War II, he put up in Paris even subsequent to being conquered by Germans. He briefly joined the underground movement where he fought for the resistance until 1942 where he was strained to flee with his French wife to the uninhabited zone so as to avoid arrest (Connor 53). After Paris was liberated from the Germans, Beckett returned to Paris where he began his most productive period of his life as a writer (Cronin 74). ESSAY Over the course of the years, Samuel Beckett’s work has extended the possibilities of fiction and drama in unexpected manners, that have brought to the novel and theatre an awareness of the absurdity of human existence (Nixon 94). While growing up, Beckett was in good terms with his father but suffered at the time of Bill’s death in the year 1933. He never had a good affiliation with his mother, and this tortured relationship between them influenced him long before and after her death in the year 1950 (Knowlson 112). Most of his writings represent an un-reconciled relationship of respect, antagonism and dependency. Samuel Beckett was an unhappy boy while growing up and soon became an unhappy man in his adulthood. He was often depressed to an extent of staying in bed until mid afternoon (Uhlmann 22). People around him found it difficult to engage with him especially where lengthy conversations were involved, took time and booze to cheer him up and apparently he was irresistible to women (Connor 55). Unfortunately, Beckett would not allow any individual to penetrate his solitude. He even rejected Joyce’s daughter’s advances citing that he was dead and possessed no feelings whatsoever that were human. Beckett’s relations with women were often abortive and complex. This can be attributed to his being overshadowed by his long-drawn-out crisis that he faced with his mother (Cronin 76). Samuel Beckett decided to seek an explanation for his consistent depression, in addition to other psychosomatic issues, and undertook a course of Jungian psychotherapy. He was still uncertain of the therapy’s success, but for the rest of his life, he remembered a lecture of Jung’s that he had attended on the subject of the ‘Never Properly Born’ (Nixon 97). The repercussions of this particular lecture were to be observed in Beckett’s subsequent work that included Waiting for Godot, All that Fall and Watt. Upon settling back in Paris, Beckett wrote a number of works in 1950, and these were plays Waiting for Godot, Eleutheria and Endgame, the novels Malone Dies, Malloy, Mercier et Camier and The Unnamable, a book of criticism and 2 books for short stories (Knowlson 114). Waiting for Godot was Beckett’s most famous productions and for this reason it was presented at San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over 1400 prisoners, as a special request. Beckett’s characters in all his works emerge from a stream of successive life experiences that make the delusion of time, stopping in one single moment that opens up the unceasing, static absurd world of absurdity (Uhlmann 23). Absurdity is the main theme in his dramatic writings where the basic question of whether there is any meaning in a human being’s existence is addressed. Man’s expected desire to be acquainted with and appreciate the world in which he survives in together with its most hidden spheres was fulfilled by religious principles regarding the existence of God, guaranteeing meaningful contingency for human life (Connor 57). However, this dogma began to decrease following World War I and World War II which resulted in deep destruction and loss of human ultimate certainties (Cronin 78). According to Albert Camus, a French novelist and essayist, absurdity can be observed in a bilateral relationship between man and the world he resides. Absurdity exists in a tension produced by man’s and the world’s mutual indifference (Nixon 99). All the works that made Samuel Beckett famous were written between 1945 and 1949 where they mostly reflected what happened after the Second World War once peace resumed. His works revealed the horrifying vision of the lengths to which humans can go in inhuman degradation as well as how much of such degradation he can survive (Knowlson 116). His work also tends to seek a distinct location for the human psyche as compared to that of the realist “fiction and drama author”. Beckett’s first play Eleutheria is a reflection of his own search for freedom and it revolves around a young man’s efforts to free himself from his family and social obligations (Uhlmann 24). His major works were originally written in French despite English being his native language. This was viewed as a curious phenomenon since his mother tongue was the accepted international language of the 20th Century (Nixon 100). Beckett’s dramatic works are not based on traditional elements of drama as he trades in characterization, plot and the final solution, which had been the hallmarks of drama (Connor 59). Language was useless in as far as his works were concerned and Beckett instead created a mythical universe characterized by lonely creatures struggling desperately to express the unexpressable (Cronin 80). Most of his characters seem to exist in a terrible dream-like vacuum, conquered by the overwhelming sense of grief and bewilderment. These characters are also portrayed as those that attempt some form of communiqué then swarming on, endlessly (Knowlson 118). Looking back on his childhood, Beckett once remarked that he had little talent for happiness, and this has been his expressions all through his works. Samuel Beckett’s literary output as a whole plus the narrative prose and dramatic works tends to minimize existential challenges to their most basic features. His style has been observed to be so concise to an extent of reducing each work to a highly compressed as well as immensely powerful image (Uhlmann 25). CONCLUSION Samuel Beckett and his wife frequently stayed in their small country house near Paris, and unlike his tormented characters in most of his works, Beckett was unique given his great serenity of spirit. He passed away peacefully in the year 1989 in Paris, on December 22. In his lifetime, Samuel Beckett was quite different from his literary peers despite the fact that he shared many of their preoccupations. His aim was not to make fun of conventional literature and theatre as did some authors during his time. Samuel Beckett was the very first absurdist to win international recognition and his works have since then been translated into over 20 languages. His work brought about new possibilities for both the theatre and novel which have not been ignored by his successors. Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1969, after being recognized as an important Irish novelist, poet and playwright having the most originality in the 20th Century. WORKS CITED Beckett, Samuel and Tredell, Nicolas. Waiting for Godot: Endgame. Duxford, Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan. 2000. Print. Bloom, Harold. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. 2nd Edition. New York: Infobase Publishing. 2008. Print. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Aurora, Colo: The Davies Group, Publishers. 2005. Print. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: HarperCollins. 1997. Print. Dukes, Gerry. Samuel Beckett. New York: Penguin. 2001. Print. Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama 1890 – 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1992. Print. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1996. Print. Nixon, Mark and Feldman, Matthew. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2009. Print. Oppo, Andrea. Philosophical Aesthetics and Samuel Beckett. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2008. Print. Uhlmann, Anthony. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Print. Read More