Chapter 7 - Samuel Beckett

Summary

Throughout his career, Samuel Beckett wrote short fiction, and from the publication of The Unnamable, in 1952, until his death in 1989 it was his favoured prose form. Yet Beckett's work is rarely, if ever, considered in the context of short fiction writing in the twentieth century. This neglect is surprising because, early on, Beckett explicitly took up with the aesthetic of the modernist story as he had inherited it from Joyce. Later, after the publication of the Trilogy (completed 1953), he turned again to short fiction in an effort to find a way to ‘go on’ from modernism, and over the next thirty years worked at the very limits of the genre.

Beckett started writing short fiction in 1932 as work on his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, began to falter. Salvaging two sections from that project, he composed a further eight stories featuring the novel's central character, Belacqua Shuah, and published the sequence under the title More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934. In the same year he published another story, ‘A Case in a Thousand’, in the Bookman magazine, only to then turn his back on short fiction until the mid-1940s, at which point he began writing in French. From then on Beckett's career was punctuated by periods of intense experimentation with short narrative forms and explorations of the limits of expression at the border with silence.