Beckett's Situation Comedy

Samuel Beckett’s subject is language, not the action or the plot or even the expectation of resolution as in earlier fictions, but the language itself, the language of the thing being written as a situation, or better, as a series of situations having conversations with themselves, as if only to be overheard by the self in isolation as an on-going performance.

What the reader, the participant in these fictions, experiences is a very different kind of performance, a stunt that may or may not be noticed by others, most likely not noticed other than by one or possibly two other onlookers, the mother and father of a newborn child for instance, performed by the stunt man, a singular wizard who’s pulling a fast one…

Books by and about Samuel Beckett, writer of novels and situation comedies, among other holdings in a private library, San Francisco, Ca.