Abstract:

This dissertation examines the closed spaces featured prominently in a number of Beckett's shorter prose works, too often passed over by critics for the more famous novels and dramas, and argues that Beckett's aesthetic of failure and decomposition relies on the relative robustness of these enclosures. Though the novels and plays also contain closed spaces, their importance is more legible in the short prose, which sets them in bold relief.

The introduction traces the origins of the "closed space narrative" to the rooms in Beckett's early prose in French (mid-1940's) and the frame in L'Image (1950's) and suggests that it finds its fullest expression in the cylindrical setting of Le D?peupleur (1970) and the skull of "Pour Finir Encore" (1975). A series of close readings, divided into four chapters, demonstrates in detail how the closed space gradually displaces the figure of the narrating subject and, ironically, thwarts the possibility of closure.

The first chapter, on Premier Amour , offers an alternative to the usual reading of this text as an oedipal narrative by suggesting that the narrator's preoccupation with rooms is not so much symptomatic of a desire to be united with a mother figure (through a uterine space) as it is an attempt, albeit futile, to seek refuge from loving--and narrating--at all. The second chapter, focusing on L'Image , shows how the first-person narrator is "framed" by the compulsion to capture himself in a verbal image and further, how this failure to enclose weakens the notion advanced by a number of critics that the je' s endeavor is an ekphrastic one. With the cylinder of Le D?peupleur , as seen in the third chapter, Beckett moves the closed space entirely to the fore, and the (disembodied) narrator finds itself further than ever from disappearing into it. The cylinder would appear to become, to borrow Jean-Yves Tadi?'s term, l'agent de la fiction , though it mostly sustains the "fiction" that a story will be told. The final chapter considers the centrality of the skull to Pour Finir Encore in which an unlocatable voice describes the disintegration of a refuge, read as the skull. A discussion of the end--both terminus and telos--of narrative in Beckett closes the study.