Abstract

Beckett's fictions and plays contain specific echoes of and parodic analogues to the famous incident in when the protagonist resists the sexual advances of the loathsome female Yahoo. But in such fictions as and , the narrator does not resist; indeed, he accepts his Yahoo status, as Gulliver never could, trying, nevertheless, to find a humanity that can come to terms with man's Yahoo nature. The Yahoo motif thus measures the difference between Swiftian satire, bent as it is on the excoriation of mankind that should know better, and Beckett's post-World War II ironic mode that refuses such firm value judgments about 'humanity.'

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