Beckett and religion

Abstract

Since the earliest days of Beckett criticism, commentators have recurrently sought to identify religious, spiritual, and mystical underpinnings within Beckett’s writing. This is from one point of view surprising. Beckett’s work can hardly be said to dramatize a journey to faith, an experience of the divine. At the extempore prayer meeting held by Hamm, Clov, and Nagg in Endgame, the participants fail to apprehend the presence of God, and quickly abandon their attitudes of prayer. Hamm’s disgusted observation about the deus absconditus is: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (Beckett 1964, 38). Indeed, a few years before Endgame’s first appearance, Harold Pinter was already communicating in a letter his admiration of what might be termed Beckett’s resourcelessness: ‘The more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. […] He’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs’ (Graver and Federman 1979, 12).