Name: Manya Lempert

Title: Beckett’s First Persons

Abstract: I’d like to make available an optimistic reading of Beckett. Comparing The Unnamable (1953) and Company (1980), I’ll argue that Beckett’s first persons in these novels pretend that their imagination and perception are not their own. They confer their life stories and sensory impressions upon externalized voices or invented characters. And the imagining personal “I” and the material world come to appear illusory. But as Wallace Stevens writes:

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined

I’ll pursue the idea that these characters’ existential and epistemological woes lead them to fictionalize in ways that are too self-negating for readers to accept at face-value. The Unnamable rarely acknowledges his feats of make-believe, but the creator of Company questions his peculiar maneuvers. In their activities of self-deception, these narrators encounter fresh suffering. The Unnamable’s disowned voice refuses to cease, and the speaker of Company is lonesome in his solipsism. We witness the repercussions of these characters’ endeavors to throw off the human “I” in despair. I’d like to suggest that these characters may reconcile us to our human imaginings, to subject and object both, because the alternatives they devise seem unbearable, paradoxical, destined to fail. So Beckett offers more than bleak exposé of forsaken minds; he tests his characters’ survival strategies to see if they suffice. We participate in his experiments, judge these first persons, their affirmations and negations.