A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Beckett's Watt

Abstract

Beckett's early commentators saw the negativity of his work as an expression of the existential impotence of the individual in the face of the world. It was said that Beckett stripped his characters of social and psychological reality, thus laying bare the void which lies at the core of being. By contrast, a later generation of commentators, influenced by poststructuralist philosophy, would reject any direct link between Beckett's work and social or psychological reality, preferring instead the notion that negativity is the expression of self-referentiality whereby the text endlessly reproduces and destroys itself. According to this view, literature is more a deconstructive meditation on the opaqueness of language itself than the representation of a complex reality by transparent means. Both of these perspectives are valid and indeed constitute the core of Beckett criticism as it stands today. However, it is arguable that too little has been made of the negativity so painstakingly presented by Beckett. The early critics are too ready to construe Beckett's work as an expression of the so-called human condition,while the poststructuralists accept too readily that such work is a language game.