Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett's Fiction

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Murphy concentrates here on those writings of Samuel Beckett least
familiar—not Waiting for Godot, not his early fiction trilogy, but his
generally short and enigmatic later works. The book has something of the
character of a call to arms. Murphy believes that the last three decades
or so of Beckett criticism have been on the wrong track. Beckett, he
claims, far from exploring and proclaiming meaninglessness, is “trying
to discover new means of integrating self and fiction and word and
world.”

It is indeed refreshing to be told that Beckett is a great writer
because he is a great moralist who is concerned with how one is to live.
Unfortunately, the book is addressed to the Beckett “establishment”
that has most to lose by accepting Murphy’s arguments. Murphy
presupposes a detailed familiarity with all these works, and offers
little help to the student or general reader. The argument is on a high
level, but the air is rarefied. If you are excited when assured that
“The question of the ontology of the fiction in All Strange Away turns
upon the use of capitalization,” or undeterred by the suggestion that
“there is an even more absolute absence of absolutes in [Lessness]
than in Beckett’s other writing,” this book is for you; if not, not.

I hope Murphy is right. I also hope he will go on to explain Beckett,
in his own revisionist terms, to a less specialized but no less indebted
readership.