Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught

Abstract

By examining two late works by Samuel Beckett, the play Not I and the poem "What is the Word," one can understand his longstanding obsession with the concept of Nothing through the philosophy of Henri Bergson. For Bergson, with whom Beckett was familiar, Nothingness does not constitute a void, but rather a form of ontological co-dependency that, for Beckett, manifests itself not as an absence, but as the striving toward absence. The preoccupation that many Beckett characters have with reaching out or toward a double (whether it be another character or some fictionalized self) will be shown to be characteristic of a Bergsonian approach to Nothingness.