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On Samuel Beckett | The Center for Fiction

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In freshman year of college, I was first exposed to Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy. For a guy who had mainly been reading science fiction and Irving/Cheever/Updike before then, this was quite an event (the class also featured Borges’s Labyrinths and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, so it was a very excellent class), which was followed not long after by my first attempt to read the Beckett “trilogy.” By the end of the next year I had read most of the extant Beckett canon. As befitted my age at the time (eighteen to nineteen) what first attracted me to the trilogy was the startling isolation and alienation of the Beckett characters (Molloy in a ditch in Eire, Malone in bed, the unnamable God knows where), but by the end of the book I was beginning instead to understand something of the beauty of the prose, and of the limpid qualities of those Beckettian koans like, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” It was some years before I found another writer who I loved as much, and

. Three Novels By Samuel Beckett In freshman year of college, I was first exposed to Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy . For a guy who had mainly been reading science fiction and Irving/Cheever/Updike before then, this was quite an event (the class also featured Borges’s Labyrinths and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , so it was a very excellent class), which was followed not long after by my first attempt to read the Beckett “trilogy.” By the end of the next year I had read most of the extant Beckett canon. As befitted my age at the time (eight

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