Still Stirring: Samuel Beckett

This essay seeks to clarify Beckett's relationship to realism and with that his considerations on the limits and possibilities of language as a tool for conveying experience. So much is said of Beckett's eagerness to deconstruct realism that little is made of those passages in his work which function exactly as those in traditional 'realist' novels. This essay finds in the oscillation between such passages and their ironic deconstruction an issue of commitment to realism, a constant unsettling of the reader who is never aware what reality is to be attributed to events. The article finds evidence that for Beckett this very uncertainty was the most powerful form of realism.