At the Crossroads of Memory and Imagination: a Poetic Image of a Window at Night in Samuel Beckett’s "A Piece of Monologue"

Abstract

The pivotal objective of this research is to analyse a poetic image of an imaginary window at night as well as a “ghost” room in Samuel Beckett’s play A Piece of Monologue through the binary lens of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Beckett’s biography. An absent onstage window, being part of an imagined reality created by the Speaker, becomes the nexus of this short play, and is discussed in relation to its locus, the writer’s memory, and material imagination. Tightly linked to Beckett’s life, childhood home and the instance of his birth, this image becomes a multi-layered construct, which gains a life of its own in the play and represents the universal themes of birth, death, loss of loved ones and mourning.