Samuel Beckett: His Quest for Direct Self-Expression

Abstract

My interest in Samuel Beckett was sparked while I was studying at l'Universite de Clermont-Ferrand in the winter of 1981. I was intrigued by the universal qualities of En attendant Godot and I wanted to discover why Beckett wrote in French. I set out to answer this question and then to compare Beckett's English fiction to his French fiction in order to establish the personality of each. The French translation still follows this line. However, in translating my criticism, I realized the trend in Beckett's work as a whole. The criticism then became an attempt to explain Beckett's ahistorical, apolitical, asocial literature. It became a study of Beckett's selfish quest.