‘my most … unshatterable association’: Memories of the pre-Socratic ‘thing‘ in Krapp's Last Tape

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In this essay, I discuss Samuel Beckett’s engagement with his Philosophy Notes in the late-1950s, with a focus on Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape. The starting-point of the essay is a famous letter that Beckett wrote in June 1957, in which he refers to his ‘notes on the pre-Socratics’ and the philosophical motif that permeates both these notes and his works of this period – namely, the ‘thing’. In the first section, I discuss Beckett’s use of Zeno’s paradox of the Heap in Endgame with reference to his notes on the pre-Socratic movement of Eleaticism – particularly its most famous exponent, Parmenides – its fundamental concept of the One, and the problem posed to this concept by the ‘thing’. In the second section, I turn to Krapp's Last Tape and argue that Beckett’s remarkable use of stillness and repetition in the play portrays Krapp’s Eleatic dream of a memory that would ‘remain […] motionless’ ( Beckett, 2009d , 3). In the third section, I discuss Beckett’s use of fire in Krapp's Last Tape and read this motif with reference to his notes on Heraclitus. I conclude the essay by arguing that Beckett identifies the ‘thing’ in with Heraclitus’ understanding of fire as change and movement as such and thereby portrays the impossibility of Krapp’s attempt to have his memory ‘be again’ (11).