Beckett's stage of deconstruction

Lance J. Butler

pp. 63-77

in: Brian Docherty (ed), Twentieth-century European drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1994

Abstract

Beckett is the poet of the poststructuralist age. In his plays, as in all his work, we are offered something like a version of the world according to Derrida. Where Beckett has already given up the search for determinable meaning, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a vain pursuit, poststructuralism would proclaim, in the 1960s and 1970s, the ultimately undecidable nature of meaning, and would celebrate meaninglessness as an objective correlative for a new vision of the world.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques

Beckett Samuel