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Against Nihilism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2020
Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable spurns both tragedy’s undeserved pains and the counter-tragic theology and philosophies (Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism) that aim to rationalize or overcome pain. Beckett’s character tries and fails to negate his humanity, imagining devolution to insentience. This chapter challenges Beckett scholarship that understands the Unnamable to be in search of mystical wordlessness and self-dissolution. Against the grain, it contends that the more Beckett’s narrator wages war on embodiment and language, the more he severs himself from all attachment to the world. His strategies, I suggest, might kindle the opposite desire in readers. This chapter proceeds to argue that Beckett rewrites this nihilistic character in Company, revisiting his tactics but supplying an alternative to them. Company’s narrator admits the attraction of a suicidal narrative strategy yet opts to resuscitate bonds with others by way of lyrical moments of memory.
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