"Absence Supreme": Narrative Strategies in Beckett's Post-trilogy Prose

Abstract

<p>This dissertation examines the ways in which Beckett, in his post-trilogy fiction, challenges the "meaning-ful" structures of the traditional novel {character, plot, action) and offers the reader, in their place, new narrative strategies. These strategies {mnemonic, canonic, catechetical, recursive) are an experiment with linguistic and narrative structures and can be seen to "dis-close" what Beckett terms as the chaos and flux behind form.</p> <p>Chapter II establishes those sorts of "meaning-ful" structures which give form to the chaos of experience, structures which, according to Frank Kermode, make sense of man's life, both in myth and in fiction, by enabling him to place a "telos" on nothingness. In this way, man constructs a world filled with teleological sequence, and consequently, "objectifies" and "spatializes" his life by insisting that there is concordance and consonance in the world.</p> <p>Chapters III and IV deal primarily with the "syntax of weakness" and the "rhetoric of abstractiom" that are characteristic of Beckett's narrative st_rategies. On the levels of language and narrative, Beckett's prose can be seen to subvert the traditional form of fiction (sequential progression of plot; motivated action; character development and presentation; ordered fictional universes with spacetime co-ordinates; and linearity) and to deprive language of its accustomed, grammatical form.</p> <p>Chapter V shows the sort of fictional world we are left with when such human consanances (normal linguistic structures and ordered fictional universes) are removed. The reader is denied that traditional fictional world, a world which, as Beckett shows us, is illusory, and which both defies category and works to dismantle--de-construct-its form.</p> <p>Beckett's fiction becomes all the more provocative when we see that his denial of closure in fiction--the formal need to have beginnings and ends--opens up the hermeneutic potential of the text. Readers, accustomed to more traditional narrative structures, are involved in a dialectic when they attempt to impose order and form om a body of language that, replete with ambiguities and abstractions, defies that impulse to establish consonance and continues to sabotage the reader's pre-conditioned impulse to construct meaning.</p>