Exploring the Self Through Habit and Memory

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Throughout his career, Beckett’s characters are, in a perpetual exploration of their inner world, for they begin to realize that knowledge of the self is just as elusive as knowledge of the outside world. This loss of self, which marks all of Beckett's characters deeply, leaves them in a kind of no man's-land between an unknowable external world and an untraceable self. Without a solid foundation for their beliefs, whether in the outer world of objects or the inner world of the self. Hence, Beckett's characters find themselves in a position of extreme epistemological weakness. Without a doubt, Beckett's most enduring contribution to world literature is his portrayal of this interstitial zone of uncertainty between subject and object. In dealing with the outside world, the Beckettian character adopts a habit that serves as both protector and prisoner. This habit refers to a set of thoughts, strategies, and (re)actions that memory calls upon throughout the attempts to make sense of and negotiate the world. Through these habitual adjustment processes, time divides self from self and subject from object, ensuring that we neither remain the same nor grasp the dynamic object-in-itself. However, habit distorts this temporal dynamism, suggesting that subjects and objects are fundamentally unchanged from one moment to the next. By using psychological research methodology as well as Proust's concept of habit, which examines the relationship between voluntary and involuntary memory and the ego's surface, This paper is twofold: first, to explore Beckett’s use of habit and memory in his controversial play Waiting for Godot to discover his self-identity, and second to demonstrate how Beckett's characters eventually fail in achieving their authentic selves.