‘Aveugle comme le destin’: Blindness and its Inevitability in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre

Abstract

Abstract Blindness proliferates throughout the œuvre of francophone Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. It is one of many forms of disability to appear in Beckett’s theatre, but is notable for the simultaneous uncertainty and certainty which surround it. While the audience can rarely be sure whether the characters they observe can see or not, and indeed must enter into a generalized structure of doubt as regards sight, the characters seem to understand blindness as an inevitability. This article examines three characters explicitly identified as blind — Pozzo in En attendant Godot, A in Fragment de théâtre i, and Hamm in Fin de partie — in direct relation to their blindness, using disability theory to examine the status of sightlessness within these texts, as opposed to viewing it as metaphor or allegory. It furthermore considers responses to blindness, from both the blind characters and their sighted companions as well as from the audience, whose potential responses to this particular disability are considered in the light of Ato Quayson’s concept of ‘aesthetic nervousness’.