What is your Samuel Beckett like?

Question

I am writing my MP on Beckett's drama Endgame, and I am very curious what is his/ its reception today.
Do you like reading Beckett? Do you have problems with understanding and interpreting his work (mainly the plays, but fiction is ok too)? What is the most problematic thing about it or why do you like it? Have you seen any of his dramas performed?
Thank you!

Answer 1

haha! hilarious article bella. that was my initial reaction too when i read godot - a deja vu of nothing. perhaps it would have been interesting for me had i seen it instead of read it (as most plays are better on stage than on paper), but looking at the stage directions of godot... that didn't look very promising either. sure, some bits were funny, but overall, i just... *shrug*

i think the best way to describe my attitude towards it is "maybe i didn't get it that's why i didn't like it." i had the same reaction for the ubiquitous "da vinci code." (i believe this is the only time you will see "waiting for godot" and "the da vinci code" mentioned in the same paragraph.)

as for what i find most problematic about it, well... nothing happens! (surprise surprise!) almost everything the characters say is redundant, that come to think of it, the second act is almost a repeat of the first. godot never arrives, and we all know he probably won't, and we know that didi and gogo know it too because finally they both decide to leave, and yet they stay. it's a horrible anticlimax.

at the risk of sounding ignorant, i simply couldn't figure out what the point was in the end. mainly because according to the foreword of my edition of the play, beckett had categorically denied that godot symbolizes god. my interpretation was :

- didi & gogo symbolize man (esp. since estragon said his name was adam) ,
- their circular dialogues, just to pass time, are a mockery of life, how repetitive and ultimately futile it actually is
- and finally godot stood for god who never comes. but beckett said godot is not god, so hmm.... perhaps he stands for meaning?

maybe i'm biased because i find existentialism to be an unwelcome (though possible) notion. and maybe i'm a traditionalist in the sense that i like a bit of plot in the things i read. but surely there's a less galling way of portraying such a dismal concept. tom stoppard did it with 'rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead.' that was hysterical! of course there probably won't be r&g without godot, so...

*sigh* i'm better off with 'the mousetrap.' lol

Answer 2

Two things are certain about Beckett, although Jean-Paul Lenogne, Sam Noiri, Italo Bezzant, and Jorge Luis Borges himself would disagree.

[1]The mystery and despair of the human condition, the resigned determination of their characters is grim to say the least. It is like reading Kenzaburo Oe or Pamela Wong.


[2] He should have not shared the Formentor Prize with Jorge Luis Borges in 1971. He, Beckett, had already gotten enough with the Nobel 2 years before.

Answer 3

I became interested in Beckett in high school after reading the Stoppard play others have mentioned. I've read many of his plays, a couple of his novels, and some poetry -- I've also listened to one of his radio plays and seen some of the television plays that he wrote for the BBC. Do I have problems with understanding and interpreting his work? Well, yes; I'd like to think that the work itself is resistant to interpretation. There are certain key themes that repeatedly and incontrovertibly emerge in Beckett, but to deny the ambiguity of his oeuvre is reductive.

Those who identify in Beckett the emergent strains of Postmodernism typically do so for two reasons; one, absurdism can be seen as post-existentialism, or at least in opposition to existentialism, the dominant philosophy of European Modernism; two, like Brecht, Beckett's work can be said to function on the plane of meta-discourse. This second reason is key here; part of Beckett's meaning IS his ambiguity.

Anyway, I like Beckett. I don't find him especially unapproachable -- he never wrote anything as dense or demanding as "Finnegan's Wake." Currently, my favorite work by him is "The Unnamable."

For an interesting view on Beckett, check out Anne Carson's new book "Decreation." It's not about Beckett, but she does encounter him at several points. The book itself is a mix of poetry and prose, and worth reading on its own merits; Anne Carson is the only poet currently writing (in English, at least) that I unreservedly admire.

Answer 4

I admire Beckett a great deal. Though it's not the plays that appeal most to me. It's the short fiction and novels I enjoy. I got my first taste of his work with Watt, for my taste one of the funniest dark books ever written. I went on to read all of the novels that year. Oddly I interspersed my reading of Beckett with Joyce for a while. When I became overfull of the Joyce's verbal opulence I turned to the other's spare macabre for relief. It actually proved to be a nice vantage on the modernist writers.

Both had the ability to lay it all out in clean strokes. Joyce demonstrated this in his short stories. But both loved to go wonderfully too far.
The third book of Beckett's trilogy, called the Unnameable, has always reminded me of the last book of Finnegans Wake. Winding meditations about the thread of existence, the soul ripped free of the tapestry, alone and extended into the emptyness of eternity.

Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed his plays.
I've seen some remarkable actors tackle his monologues. Most memorably I had the great pleasure of seeing Julian Beck of the living theatre perform Embers. It was to be Beck's last performance.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to summon this to memory.

Answer 5

I had to read Beckett's Endgame for a modern drama class in Spring of '05. It's the only thing I've read by him, but it was a lot of fun--partially because my professor had us use our own interpretation of the play to build a sort of diarama. My partner and I wandered off in a totally odd direction and interpreted the play as taking place entirely underwater and built ours around that...I think we went the farthest off the beaten path, but everybody had entirely different interpretations of the play and they all managed to make sense.

I did have some trouble understanding parts of the play, though--which is part of the reason my interpretation was so odd, because I was trying to make some of the things that I didn't understand make sense. But that's part of the reason I liked it, too, because part of it seemed so random that it circled back and meant something...

...yeah, Beckett's odd. Good, but odd.

Answer 6

I'm an English Masters', and have made it through 5 years of post-secondary school without ever reading Beckett. And I'm not sure I'd ever want to. My impressions of him aren't positive; I'm sure he is critically interesting, but I'm a Renaissance girl myself and not into the whole modernist/post-modernist thing. It's all very bleak and pessimistic.

I'm thinking he's sort of like, perhaps, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - except not as funny?

5 minutes later:

Have a look at this article: one of my school friends sent it to me a few months ago, and I just hunted it down for you. Now this informs my opinion of Samuel Beckett! Why would I want to read "Mr. Blank Manuscript"?!!! "Sparse stage directions, a mysterious quality of anonymity, a slow building of tension with no promise of relief, and an austere portrayal of the human condition"? Ehhh....no, thanks.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47722

Answer 7

The most important playwright of the 20th century.
He had the ability to strip down human experience to the bare essentials
The most difficult thing about his plays is that you have to pay attention all the time and concentrate on the words because each word is vital to the story, there is nothing superfluous..
This is not easy when most people have a short attention span.

Answer 8

Although at one time I was a playwright myself I like Beckett's shorter prose better than his plays. His narrative and descriptive prose, though sparse, adds a flavor and depth to the characters that his plays don't seem to provide. From stories like 'The Expelled' or 'What a Misfortune' they say more with less, unlike writers today who 'pad' their prose with non-essentials.

Answer 9

My mistake thought you meant Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap! Can't say your guy sounds that interesting from previous answers, but to each his own....Sam Beckett!

Answer 10

i'm a great fan of "waiting for godot", that scathing commentary on.the total absurdity of human life at one level of interpretation (certainly not buddhist), and the curious sheeplike quality of humans always wishing to follow rather than act on their own initiative. there are the archetypal master and follower--the psychopath and the victim--pozzo and lucky. and then the waiting.."do you think he will come TODAY(finally)"? i'm recalling this from 40 years ago in a performance with kurt kasznar as pozzo, i believe. finally, it's the feeling tone you're left with at the end---the emptiness and disappointment...and longing. one obvious question, of course, is whether godot is meant to be god(ot), with humans waiting endlessly to have him intercede on their behalf to assuage the "pain and meaninglessness of it all". an existential classic.(, as was the case in some of the ingmar bergman films from that period) one leaves the theatre quietly. actually when i think about "waiting..." i'm always reminded of t s elliot's lines in "the wasteland" : "i think we are in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones". always interesting stuff, but not exactly uplifting, eh?