Any experts on Samuel Beckett?

Question

I'm trying to track down a short-story that I read as a teenager and which made a deep impression on me. It was by Beckett and it started with a stream of consciousness in which an old (?) man reminiscened over a stairway he'd known as a child. In those days I read it in a Danish translation, which makes it even harder, but it went something like this: "The stairs weren't very high. I'd played on them many times as a child and counted their steps. Only, I couldn't tell you how high they were, because I never knew if I had to count the ground level as one step and the top level as one step. Consequently, I'd always arrive at three different numbers. I'm not even sure that, even if I found one of the three numbers in my memory the other two would come back to me as well..." and so on. I really want to re-read this story as an adult man, so if it rings a bell I'll be most grateful for a clue.

Answer 1

I think it is "The Expelled" from 1945. "The step-counting ritual that opens “The Expelled” is the sort of absurd mental exercise one engages in when trying to keep oneself going in a moment of unbearable stress. The narrator admits that “After all, it is not the number of steps that matters.” (He has been considering whether to count the sidewalk as the first step which would give him n + 1, or to count the top of the steps as well, which makes n + 2.) “The important thing to remember is that there were not many, and that I have remembered.”:"

The short story can be found in the books "First love and other novellas", 2000; "The expelled and other novellas", 1980; "Collected shorter prose 1945-1980", 1984; "No's knife : collected shorter prose 1945-1966" from 1967 - and other collections, too.

In Danish translation, you can find the short story in Den udstødte : noveller og tekster / på dansk ved Uffe Harder, 2002; Noveller og Tekster for intet, 1968.

Answer 2

...are you sure it's a story, and not a brief radio play? I recall a radio play of his that involved stairs, and possibly a tape recorder.

Answer 3

try samuel-beckett.net there is a bunch of plays there.