Samuel Becket
Samuel Becket
Beckett, Samuel (Foxrock 1906 - Parigi 1989), playwriter, poet and irish novelist, was the most important figure, toghrter with Eugene Ionesco, of the Theatre of the Absurd. Having studied foreign languages and Modern Literature (French and Italian), for two years, from 1928 to 1930, Beckett was lecteur in a French Ecole Normale in Paris.Here he met and became a great friend of James Joyce. In 1937, after two frenetic years spent trough Ireland, England and France, he eventually settled in Paris. He joined the French resistance movement, working as an underground agent in Paris. In 1942 he because of the Gestapo he had to go hiding in the region of Avignon, where he wrote the novel Watt ,unpublished untill 1953. After his first English works (collection of poems and the novel Murphy, he began to write in 1943 in French, also with his English version.
In
1950 he lived in Paris again. Here he wrote the Malone trilogy of novels
and the play Waiting for Godot (1953), that can be considered his masterpiece.
In the following years he wrote a lot of plays, some of which very short,
like Fin de Partie (1957), Krapp' s Last Tape (1959), Happy Days (1963).
Beckett places man in the dilemma of being unable to find any essential
purpose in his actions. Trough a stylized and patterned language, the plays
show, also physically, the immobility of the characters, in world where
isn't possible any psycological or existenzial evolution. In Waiting for
Godot the two characters,Vladimir and Estragon, spend two days on the streetside,
and probably all their existence, waiting for the misterious Godot, whose
coming is always delated to the day after; in Fin de Partie the character
is a slave/son and his parents still in dustbins, while the characters
of Commedy are closed in gravestone. In the Happy Days the protagonist,
buried alive, speaks about strange matters to his husband, whose presence
is underlined only by some answers. In 1969 Beckett was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature.
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