Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative

How are we to think of Beckett’s fiction? Lyrical, inventive, uncompromising, beautifully precise-an immense achievement—is it really an art that proclaims the disintegration of language and of the imagination, as traditional readings conclude? Eyal Amiran’s study demonstrates that Beckett’s work does not embody the failure of synthetic vision. Beckett’s fiction transposes a large intertextual logic from the Western metaphysics it is said to disown, and so takes its place in a literary and philosophical tradition that extends from Plato to Joyce and Yeats. At the same time, it develops as a serial narrative, from the early novels to the late short fictions, to unravel the story itself that its metaphysical tradition tells.