Chapter One

I

SAMUEL BECKETT

The search for the self



In his last will and testament, Murphy, the hero of Samuel Beckett's early novel of that name, enjoins his heirs and executors to place his ashes in a paper bag and take them to 'the Abbey Theatre, Lr Abbey Street, Dublin ... into what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit . . . and that the chain be there pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece.'1 This is a symbolic act in the true irreverent spirit of the anti-theatre, but one that also reveals where the author of Waiting for Godot received his first impressions of the type of drama against which he reacted in his rejection of what he has called 'the grotesque fallacy of realistic art-"that miserable statement of line and surface" and the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations'.2

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906, the son of a quantity surveyor. Like Shaw, Wilde, and Yeats, he came from the Protestant Irish middle class and was, though he later lost his faith, brought up 'almost a Quaker', as he himself once put it.3 It has been suggested that Beckett's preoccupation with the problem of being and the identity of the self might have sprung from the Anglo-Irishman's inevitable and perpetual concern with finding his own answer to the question 'Who am I?', but while there may well be a grain of truth in this, it is surely far from providing a complete explanation for the deep existential anguish that is the keynote of Beckett's work and that clearly originates in levels of his personality far dee