The Long View: Beckett, Johnson, Wordsworth and the Language of Epitaphs

Abstract

This article will investigate the idiom of death and memorialization in Beckett's work in relation to two particularly distinguished students of the epitaph, Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth, and consider how Beckett negotiates the different expectations of writing about death that each figure has bequeathed. It will examine Beckett's exploration, following that of Wordsworth, of how far writing about the dead can borrow, imaginatively, from the 'dispassionate' and 'all-equalising' perspective of death itself, and also consider Beckett's particularly laconic treatment of the difficulty in avoiding, as the Romantic poet put it, a certain 'triteness' in the summation of a life.