WAITING FOR GODOT BY SAMUEL BARCLAY BECKETT

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Samuel Beckett was born in 13 April 1906. Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on Good Friday, 1906, Samuel Barclay Beckett was the younger of two sons born to William Frank Beckett and May Barclay. The area surrounding his family home featured in his prose and poetry later in life. He was an Irish avant-garde playwright, poet and novelist best known for his play Waiting for Godot. Strongly influenced by fellow Irish writer, James Joyce, Beckett is sometimes painstaking the last of the Modernists, however, as his body of work influenced many subsequent writers, he is also considered one of the fathers of the Postmodernist movement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, for his writing, which in new forms for the novel and drama in the impoverishment of modern man acquires its elevation.

        Irish poet and Beckett biographer Anthony Cronin said of Samuel Beckett’s childhood, “if anything, an outdoor type rather than an indoor one. He enjoyed games and was good at them. He roamed by himself as well as with his cousin and brother; and though he often retreated to his tower with a book and was already noticeable in the family circle for a certain moodiness and taciturnity, he could on the whole have passed for an athletic, extrovert little Protestant middle-class boy with excellent manners when forced to be sociable.”

        He attended Trinity College from 1923 to 1927, earning a Bachelor’s degree in French and Italian. He took a teaching position at Campbell College in Belfast before moving to Paris to become a lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure. In Paris, Beckett was introduced to Irish novelist James Joyce that had a thoughtful effect on Beckett’s life. Samuel Beckett biographer James Knowlson writes, of the relationship between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.  Around this time Samuel Beckett aided Joyce in his research for what would one day become Finnegan’s Wake, he also wrote a critical essay entitled, “Dante…Bruno… Vico…Joyce,” in which Samuel Beckett defended James Joyce’s exertion and technique.

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        Samuel Beckett’s first published work, a short story entitled, “Assumption,” appeared in transition, a highly influential avant-garde serial edited by Franco-American writer Eugene Jolas. He won his first literary prize the next year with the poem, “Whoroscope,” which imagined Réné Déscartes meditating on the nature of time while waiting to be served an egg at a restaurant. Following his first two published works, Beckett returned to Dublin from Paris to accept a lecturing position at Trinity College. He became cynical with academia shortly thereafter and resigned from his position by playing a practical joke on the college. Samuel Beckett invented a French author named Jean du Chas who had founded a literary movement called “concentrism” and presented a lecture on Chas and Concentrism to scoff at the laboriousness in the academic world.

        Resigning from his position at Trinity College, he traveled through Europe and Britain, stopping in London to publish Proust, a critical study of Marcel Proust’s work and Beckett’s only published work, long-form work of criticism. During his travels, Beckett met many vagabonds and wanderers, which he would use as the bases for several of his most memorable characters. Throughout his European wanderings, Samuel Beckett also became interested in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and decided to devote himself entirely to writing, beginning to work on his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he subsequently abandoned after little interest from publishers.

               

        Beginning what would become his first published novel, Murphy, in 1935, Samuel Beckett traveled once again to Europe, this time to Germany where he documented with revulsion the rise of the Nazi party. Returning to Ireland in 1937 to keep an eye on the publication of Murphy, he had a big fight with his mother, which contributed to his desire to leave Ireland and settle permanently in Paris. At the outset of 1938, Beckett had installed himself on the Left Bank of Paris where he renewed his friendship with James Joyce and became friends with artists like Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses

               

        He also began writing in French instead of his native English because he found it easier to write, their literary work is “without style.” His first novel in French was entitled “Mercier Et Camier” which was written in 1946 but not published until 1970. Immediately after the novel, he wrote what many believe to be his best prose in the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/333329.Mercier_And_Camier

        Following this new path to full fruition, Samuel Beckett released his most famous work in 1953, the minimalist play, “Waiting for Godot”. This play was very successful albeit controversial in the theaters of Paris but was not as well received in London and in the US. As time progressed, however, Godot garnered critical acclaim, which ultimately saw Samuel Beckett awarded the International Publisher’ Formentor Prize in 1961. During this period Samuel Beckett also wrote the plays Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Endgame and Play.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/waiting-for-godot-id-0802130348.aspx

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        This period also saw changes in Samuel Beckett’s personal life. His mother, with whom he had many difficulties, died in 1950 and his brother, Frank, died in 1954, both of these deaths affected Beckett’s later meditations on life and death in his work. He also married Suzanne in a private ceremony in England in 1961. The success of his plays not only offered him the ability to experiment with his writing but also enabled him to begin a career as a theater director as well as to branch out into other mediums. In 1956 he was commissioned by the BBC to write the radio play All that Fall and continued to expand his scope into television and cinema.

      His later work, which focused on themes of entrapment and frequently featured characters whose were literally trapped from the neck down, went through many phases, culminating in three “closed space stories” in which he interrogates the nature of memory and its effect on the confined and observed self. His final work, written in 1988, was a poem entitled “Comment Dire (What is the Word),” which deal with the powerlessness to find the words to express oneself. Samuel Beckett died on the 22nd of December, 1989, just five months after his wife, Suzanne. They are interred together at the Cimitiére de Montparnasse in Paris in a tomb of simple granite, following Samuel Beckett’s instruction that it should be, “any color, as long as it is gray.”

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