I have been a man long enough, I shall not put up with it
anymore, I shall not try anymore (Molloy 175)
the bees (169)I have always behaved like a pig (25)
all you can hope for is to be a little less in the end the
creature you were in the beginning (30 italics added)
after the I forgets to be, the body remains (no longer a sealed
jar, but now filled with roots and tame stems (49)hobbling on
crutches like an insect (64)the words I uttered to myselfwere often
to me as the buzzing of an insect (50)the political moment- losing
humanity points toward losing property (132)Becketts shared
revulsion as an equalizer: Moran I dont like animals. I dont like
people. God is beginning to disgust me (105)bee-line to the Madonna
of Turdy (173)
Against Human transcendence - molloy could stay where he
happened to be
Is Becketts principal concern with investigating the human
condition or with deconstructing it? In other words, are his works
written after the death of God or after the death of Man? [...] Do
we better understand Beckett as a humanist who wishes to explore
the etre-pour-soi or as an antihumanist who is more interested in
Sein than Dasein? (Begam, Samuel Beckett and Antihumanism, 300)
this ostensibly ethical shift from a humanist discourse,
centered on man, to an antihumanist discourse, centered on language
(302) is a disingenuous-----------------------when it comes to
exegesis, we are mostly putting words into a mouth constantly
engaged in spitting them out. (Benjamin Kunkel, Sam I am New Yorker
August 7th 2006)
--------------Becketts deployment of insectile imagery in
thecharacterisation of human subjectivity and culture serves to
reduce thissubjectivity and culture to its natural determinants;
and that in doing so, Beckett succeeds in giving voice to a
material reality that has beensystematically excluded by the
anthropomorphic mirror of culture (Carney, 228)Molloys and Morans
reversion to crawling as a means of locomotionafact that clearly
gestures towards a phylogenetic regression to an insectilemode of
movement (230)
when Adorno suggests that rational thought cannot grasp the full
import of suffering without itselfbecoming irrational, it can be
argued that the reversion to the pre-rational signified by Becketts
materialist motifs represents just such anattempt to engage with
carnal reality of human suffering (Carney 239)
STEPHEN CONNOR BECKETTS RADICAL FINITUDEit is that we find it
almost impossibly hard to apprehend the limited and finite nature
of the lives we live every day, the fact that we can live only the
life we can live, in such a place, in such a world. To say that
Beckett's work constitutes a radical finitude is to say that it
strives to permit itself the very least remission it can manage
from this awareness of always having to live, move and have its
being 'in such a world... on such and such a day', never in the
world in general, or 'as such'Finitude signifies a kind of
privation in the heart of being, an awareness of the ever-present
possibility of loss, and the looming necessity of death, which
means that one is never 'quite there', as Beckett said of 'M' in
Footfalls, and prevents one living wholly in the here and now. This
aspect of finitude makes it hard to distinguish absolutely from
indefiniteness. Finitude comes up short of the definite. This mode
of finitude overlaps with that of temporal finitude, since, after
all, death is often experienced or represented as just such a
limit, or arbitrary curtailing. Finitude here means, not the
certainty of coming to an end, but the certainty of ending
unfinished, dying, as we all must, before our time.
Beckett is, as Heidegger alleged animals were, 'poor in world',
poor in the worldhood of 'the world'.Beckett's finitude is radical
in this sense, that it casts no shadow, inaugurates no series.
Finitude has no syntax; it is perseverance without project. This
accounts for the power of repetition, the awareness of 'that
again', the epiphany that shows and gives rise to nothing, and yet
recurs, paratactic, a privation deprived of improvement.
