‘Going On’: Digression and Consciousness in The Beckett Trilogy

Abstract

Any attempt to elaborate a poetics of digression in European fiction must take account of Samuel Beckett’s unique contribution to the limits and potentialities of this narrative strategy. The fictional narratives of Samuel Beckett are especially preoccupied by digression and discontinuity: the narrators in Beckett’s fiction are engaged in a perpetual endeavour to explore the meanderings of a disintegrating consciousness, and thus deviate from any unified concept of subjectivity, in order to translate the fragmentation of the self in a discourse characterized by repetition, instability and fracture. Beckett’s adoption of this narrative structure has become extremely influential in modern and contemporary fiction, especially in the nouveau roman movement of writers (many of whom were also published by his French publisher, Les Editions de Minuit), who sought to contest omniscience, traditional linear narrative, plot and character-based fiction (in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Robert Pinget the Beckettian influence is particularly tangible). The enduring impact of the Beckettian monologue is evident in the works of writers as diverse as Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and James Kelman. Arguably, Beckett’s variation on the internal monologue presents an extreme case in the development of modern fiction. This chapter examines the way in which digression in Beckett’s trilogy is used as the principal narrative device that serves to foreground both the workings of consciousness and the predominance of discours over recit in narratological terms, a discourse which presents a vivid formal and stylistic metaphor for disintegration.