Study Guide to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Other Works by Samuel Beckett

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Manuali di studio
• Subtopic: Guide di studio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Samuel Beckett, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature in 1969. Titles in this study guide include All That Fall, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Waiting for Godot. As an unconventional but modernist author of the war ravaged 20th century, Beckett focused on essential elements of the human condition in dark, humorous ways. Moreover, Beckett was often associated with the “Theatre of the Absurd, ” where his work displayed conventional plot and structure and utilized laughter as a prominent tool against despair. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Beckett’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO SAMUEL BECKETT

Samuel Beckett’s importance is neatly summed up in the official statement made by the Swedish Academy when it awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969:

Beckett has exposed the misery of man in our time through new dramatic and literary forms. His . . . muted minor tone holds liberation for the oppressed and comfort for the distressed.

It was characteristic of the gaunt, shy, baggy - suited Beckett . . . who lives a life of almost monastic simplicity . . . to announce that he would not go to Stockholm to accept his $80,000 prize in person. No one who knows Beckett well was surprised. His close friends tell us he is unable to stand praise or flattery of any kind. If he had attended the Nobel ceremonies, he would have been expected to wear formal clothes, make a formal speech, and talk about his work. But Beckett distrusts conformity and ceremony and, as we shall see, he doubts the validity of “public” language. Unlike many contemporary writers who are actively “engaged” in public life, Beckett prefers to address the world almost exclusively through his art. When he received the Prize money, it was reported that he gave most of it to “resistance” groups.

Some of Beckett’s critics have assumed that he must have had a miserable childhood in order to write so much about the “misery of man.” Beckett confounds these simple minds by stressing that he had a very happy childhood. He was born in 1906 near Dublin, where his father, a quantity surveyor, was a partner in the firm of Beckett and Metcalfe. The family was Protestant and solidly bourgeois; Samuel’s mother and brother were both deeply religious. Young Samuel attended Earlsford House, a Protestant day school in Dublin, whose director, Monsieur Lepelon, planted in his protégé an interest in French culture. Later Samuel was sent to Portora Royal School (Oscar Wilde’s school) at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in northern Ireland. This was a typical English Protestant “public” school which encouraged a life of rugged athletics and serious application to studies. Under the guidance of the French teacher, Mademoiselle Tennant, Beckett developed a lifelong passion for the Romance languages.

Back in Dublin in his late teens, Beckett frequented the Abbey Theatre, then featuring the works of J. M. Synge; and he attended Trinity College, where he majored in Italian and French, excelled in cricket and rugby, and earned a reputation as both a popular student and a non - conformist. For example, it was rumored that an essay of his was submitted to the examining professors on toilet paper. After Beckett took his B.A. in 1927, one of his teachers, Professor Rudmose Brown, arranged an exchange - lectureship for him at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he taught for two years.

During this time he made the acquaintance of James Joyce, the Irish writer self - exiled in Paris whose novel Ulysses (1922) had established him as the master of stream - of - consciousness fiction. Joyce was engaged on a “Work in Progress.” Beckett undertook a French version of parts of the “Work” and produced a brilliant exegesis of it, published as Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929).

One day in 1930, Beckett heard that Nancy Cunard, Paris publisher, and Richard Aldington, poet and critic, were offering a prize of ten pounds for the best poem submitted on the subject of “Time.” The deadline was next morning. Beckett swiftly composed a poem based on events in the life of the philosopher Rene Descartes, and rushed across Paris by night to make certain he got the manuscript into the publisher’s mail - box before the deadline. “Whoroscope”, as the poem was called, won the prize, was published by Miss Cunard’s “The Hours Press” in a limited edition of 300 copies, and launched Beckett on his career as a creative writer.

In 1931 he returned to Trinity College as Lecturer in French and assistant to Professor Brown, earned his master’s degree for research on Descartes, and published a probing, poetic essay on Proust. But in spite of his obvious talents as critic and scholar, Beckett came to feel unsuited for the academic life, and for the next four years he knocked around London and the Continent. His spiritual agonies during this period are reflected in his first volume of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and especially in his volume of verse, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1936).

In 1937, Beckett settled on Paris as his permanent home. Soon after, his father died, leaving the 32-year - old writer with a small inheritance on which he managed to eke out a sparse living until his plays achieved some financial success. One of his acquaintances of this period has described him as “dressed badly,” with absolutely “no vanity about his appearance.” He was tall, long - striding, with enormous green eyes “that never looked at you.” He wore spectacles, seldom spoke, never said anything silly, and had a wonderful sense of humor.

Joyce was now suffering acutely from failing vision. All his friends, including Beckett, would help him by reading to him and by taking down passages of “Work in Progress” as Joyce dictated them. Beckett especially, with his subtle command of several tongues, was a great inspiration to Joyce who at that time was developing his techniques of multi - lingual punning. Beckett spent so much time in the Joyce household that the impression spread that he was “Joyce’s secretary.” Indeed, Joyce’s daughter thought Beckett must actually be courting her. The young Irishman had to make it painfully clear he came mainly to see her father.

Joyce’s “Work” was finally published in 1938 under the title of Finnegans Wake. And Beckett’s technical debt to Joyce . . . as well as the ways his interests differed from those of the master . . . was made clear in Beckett’s own first novel, Murphy, also published that year.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Beckett, then in Ireland visiting his mother, returned to the Continent. “I preferred France in was to Ireland in peace,” he later told The New York Times. After Paris fell, he joined a Resistance group. In August 1942, the group was discovered, several of his comrades were captured by the Nazis, and Beckett, fearing for his life, fled to the Vaucluse (Unoccupied Zone) and worked as a farm - hand near Avignon. In all the stress and confusion of war, he managed to work on his second novel, Watt. After the liberation of France, he served as interpreter and storekeeper with an Irish Red Cross unit at a field hospital at Saint Lo, was decorated for outstanding non - combat service, and married Suzanne, a girl he had met in the Resistance.

Settling down again in peacetime Paris, Beckett worked feverishly for five years in what he has since regarded as his greatest burst of creativity. Writing in French, he turned out his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Meurt, and L’Innommable; his first great play, En Attendant Godot; and a volume of stories and sketches, Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien. Later he produced English versions of each of these works: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable; Waiting for Godot; and Stories and Texts for Nothing.

Until his forty - seventh year, Beckett was well known only in literary and intellectual circles, and even then mainly as a translator and critic. But on January 5, 1953, En Attendant Godot was first performed in Paris. It was an instant critical and popular success, and ran for more than 300 nights. Waiting for Godot has since been translated into more than twenty languages, and is already considered a turning - point in modern drama.

For a long while, Beckett wrote nothing significantly new and indeed, thought he had run dry. Then in 1956 he completed Fin de Partie. Translating it into English, as Endgame, set him off on a new series of short works in his native tongue: Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, and several radio and TV plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation. This second great burst of writing resolved itself in a free - verse novel, written first in French as Comment c’est (1961) and later in an English recreation, How it is (1964).

During the 1960’s, Beckett became an influential figure in all dramatic media. In British television studios, in the streets of New York where he has done his film with Buster Keaton, in the “legitimate” theatre, he has worked firmly but easily with directors and actors, all of whom regard him as a natural genius. Lately he has served as his own producer. When not in rehearsal, he divides his time between his Paris house and his country cottage which he bought with the proceeds from Godot. He avoids the public eye. He gives few interviews, is rarely photographed, and indeed, after winning the Nobel Prize, went into virtual hiding for several months. News from his friends, however, indicated that the great multi - lingual artist was at work in a totally new world of imagination, on totally new forms, which John Calder described in 1970 as “more painterly than literary.”

SAMUEL BECKETT: CHRONOLOGY

1906 April 13: Samuel Beckett is born at Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland

1927 Graduates from Trinity College, Dublin, with B.A. in French and Italian

1928-1930 Reader in English in École Normale Supérieure, Paris

1930 Wins prize for poem “Whoroscope”

1930-1931 Lecturer in French, Trinity College

1931 Takes M.A., publishes essay on Proust

1932-1936 Wanders in England, France, Germany

1937 Settles permanently in Paris

1938 First novel, Murphy, published in London

1940 Paris falls to Nazis; Beckett joins Resistance

1942 Flees to Unoccupied Zone of France; writes Watt

1945 Joins staff of Irish Red Cross hospital at Saint Lo

1947 Murphy published in French

1947-1949 Writes trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Meurt, L’Innommable) and play En Attendant Godot

1951 Molloy and Malone Meurt published

1952 En Attendant Godot published

1953 January 5: premiere of En Attendant Godot, Paris Watt and L’Innommable published

1954 Waiting for Godot published in New York

1955 August: Godot plays in London Molloy published in New York Nouvelles et Textes pour rien published in France

1956 Waiting for Godot plays in Miami Malone Dies published in New York

1957 January 13: All that Fall produced by British Broadcasting Corporation Fin de Partie published in France April 3: Fin de Partie performed in French in London

1958 October 28: Endgame (in English) and Krapp’s Last Tape open in London Endgame published in New York

1959 June 24: Embers broadcast by BBC

1961 Comment c’est published in France

September 17: Happy Days opens off - Broadway, New York

1962 November 13: Words and Music broadcast by BBC

1963 June 14: Play first performed, in German, at Ulm Cascando broadcast in Paris

1964 Film produced in New York with Buster Keaton How it is published in New York

1969 Beckett wins Nobel Prize for Literature

1970 The Collected Works published in New York

BECKETT’S PHILOSOPHICAL RELATIONS

Modern philosophy figures so prominently in Beckett’s work that many critics find it convenient to treat him mainly in philosophical terms. Frederick Hoffman refers to the novels as “epistemological inquiries” and to the plays as “reflections upon the existence of God.” Martin Esslin talks of Beckett’s writings as the “culmination of existentialist thought,” superior in some ways to the works of Sartre himself. And Jacquelin Hoefer plunges into a discussion of Beckett’s Watt with the phrase, “In this philosophic satire, . . .”

Beckett himself . . . in both his poetry, fiction, and film - writing . . . makes many direct references to philosophers like Heraclitus, Descartes, Geulincx, Malebranche, and Berkeley. In all his creative writing, he freely uses concepts and images . . . sometimes details from the very lives . . . of these and other thinkers including St. Augustine and Wittgenstein. In interviews, he has been quoted as commenting on Heidegger and Sartre.

Obviously, then, there is considerable value in reviewing Beckett’s philosophical relations . . . direct and indirect, explicit or implicit . . . with philosophers ancient and modern.

BECKETT AND HERACLITUS

An ancient Greek, Heraclitus (530-470 B.C.) typifies the bold thinker who accepts the evidence even when it shows him what he does not want to see. Heraclitus passionately hoped to find proof of permanence and unity in nature, but he had to admit that he could see only change and diversity. His famous example is that one cannot place the same foot in the same stream a second time . . . neither the foot nor the stream is by then the same. “Everything flows” (including Heraclitus’ tears, if the story of his disenchantment is accurate). To a modernist, Heraclitus stands for the beliefs that time is more real than space, that the many are closer to experience than the one, that becoming is closer to reality than being. A Beckett character would see Heraclitean flux not only in the outer world, he would experience it also in the inner world. Consciousness also fluctuates. One cannot contemplate that same foot, that same stream, twice with the same mind. For example, in Beckett’s How it is, the narrator (who refers directly to Heraclitus: p. 34) qualifies his own account of his own existence by reminding us often that there have been many “states” in his life and many different “versions” of those states.

BECKETT AS A MODERN GORGIAS

An ancient Sicilian teacher, Gorgias of Lentini (483-375 B.C.), is supposed to have wrapped up this package of values: Not...