SAMUEL BECKETT ON MAN.

SAMUEL BECKETT ON MAN. Samuel Beckett’s plays dramatize the triviality of ordinary lives when compared with the enormities of time and space, the details of ordinary lives are trivial. This wikipedia article quotes James Knowlson who had interviewed Beckett: “Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it … In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a ‘non-knower’ and as a ‘non-can-er.'” Beckett showed the boredom and pain of bare existence. As this essay puts it: “In order to deal with the question of bare existence as such, Beckett depicts man in the state of being nothing and doing nothing without superimposing conventional narrative structure on the action.” My own feelings are that what Beckett says is self evident. I recognize that in the scale of the universe, our lives are no more interesting than the lives of ants are to us. But the lives of ants are interesting to other ants.