L’ impasse de l’Enfant-Jésus: some remarks on Beckett’s bilingualism

The purpose of this paper is to identify some essential themes and patterns in Beckett’s work and to suggest how his bilingualism was drawn into these. I assume, that is, that by the late 1930s when Beckett began translating Murphy into French, and even more so by 1946 when he began to write narrative prose in French, there was a strong pattern in his life, in the positions he assumed, socially and artistically, which inevitably fashioned the role that bilingualism would play in his achievement.