Introduction

Summary

On my asking Beckett how he goes about writing, his answer was unexpectedly brief: ‘One decides what elements to use and puts them together’. Audiences and scholars of his work, hard put to keep up with Beckett’s erudition, have observed the extraordinary number of elements he stitches into his texts while taking care to conceal them, cast doubt on them, parody, or unravel them. In engaging with Beckett’s poetics of indirectness, exegetes have not failed to note the Buddhist threads that pervade his works.