"WITHOUT SOLUTION OF CONTINUITY" - Beckett's "That Time" and Trauma Memoir

"WITHOUT SOLUTION OF CONTINUITY": Beckett's "That Time" and Trauma Memoir
Author(s): Rhys Tranter

Source: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 27, "Beginning of the murmur":
Archival Pre-texts and Other Sources (2015), pp. 115-128
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44018150
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"WITHOUT SOLUTION OF CONTINUITY":
Beckett's That Time and Trauma Memoir
Rhys Tranter
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the popularization of the 'trauma memoir':
autobiographical accounts concerned with representing and memorializing
traumatic memory and experience. These biographical texts owe something to
the autobiographical traditions of Western humanism, yet simultaneously
trouble our understanding of time, place, and identity. Drawing on the work of
Maurice Blanchot, Roger Luckhurst and Jacques Derrida, the article defines
how, despite its formal challenges, the standard 'trauma memoir' remains
dependent upon the assumption of a single, fixed subject position from which to
speak, and examines how Beckett's experimental 1976 play That Time both
inaugurates and challenges this new era of traumatic accounting.
Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.

Beckett, Stirrings Still
Time, Trauma and the Self

Samuel Beckett's That Time was first performed in 1976, produced as
one of a series of events celebrating the author's seventieth birthday. Its
title is playfully referential, acknowledging its status as a temporal
marker for an anniversary. In this respect, the text enacts a moment of
retrospection, ordering and contextualising the past so that we may seize
upon it in the present. The play appears to tell the tale of an old man,
perhaps on his deathbed, recalling memories from his life. The time of
the anniversary coincides with the time his tale is told, suggesting an
opportunity for closure and hindsight: a space of resolution and
reconciliation for its ageing protagonist. But a closer look at the
construction of the play reveals a more complex outlook. That Time is
preoccupied with issues of time, place, and identity. As a text, it draws
attention to the difficulties of maintaining a grasp on any singular
historical moment, accentuating confusion and dissonance. Whilst the
116 Rhys Tranter
protagonist's memories themselves app

melancholia, That Time also disrupts co
personal history, and unsettles the coh
subject. Some of these peculiarities
identified as problematic for decades; a
writes, his work demarcates a contradi
and selflessness, if not placelessne
presence is a crucial one in Beckett's po
Kennedy states in a collection preoccup
history and trauma: "[His] writings can
historical readings, an observation that
after the Second World War. [...] [T
Beckett's reputation give the distinct im
anywhere and nowhere'" (1). That Time
set of critical observations, precisely be
is a text that challenges the Western m
and presence that authenticate rational
Roger Luckhurst identifies a "mem
century culture, where the autobiog
"outstrip the narrative conventionality
might be called the pressure of the re
from contemporary art and the work o
a cultural shift toward the real and the tr
burst through representation and appe
What results is a return to certain realist
added awareness of their status as repr
explicit, Luckhurst quotes Michael
Traumatic Realism might offer n
representing traumatic narratives: "a reali
the relationship of discourse to the real
exposed; a realism in which the claims
the traumatic extremity that disable
(Rothberg, 106). Whilst Samuel Beckett
the conventions of autobiographical fo
there is something to be said for the w
certain realist practices and demands. Th
with a single teller, That Time stages a
a plurality of different contexts.
In standard traumatic memoirs, L
connection with the genre of autobi
Beckett's That Time and Trauma Memoir 1 17
"deepest Western traditions of self-knowledge and humani

Accordingly, the genre offers "the unity of identity acro
interpreting life in its totality" via a reliable and coherent nar
Luckhurst is careful to stress that the confusion and disorientation
traumatic event unravels the security of the rational humani
position. Turning to the term 'memoir' more generally, he des
genre as a "lowlier form" of autobiography, "an incompl
fragmentary slice of a life" that is more closely linked to uncer
ambiguity than truth or humanist mastery. As he puts it, "t
memoir recounts a discordance, a circling around a shattering
from which self-knowledge arrives late, if at all, and
uncomfortable awareness of the frangibility of the self
Beckett's text obeys some of the conventions of autobiogr
following Luckhurst's description is closer, in style and conten
memoir.
Anticipating the 'memoir boom' of the 1980s and 1990s, Th
uses personalised recollections to examine the limitations of s
traumatic narrative representation. What is perhaps most dis
about Beckett's approach is that while it bears many resembla
style and content, to what would later become recognised as
narratives, there is no direct experience or articulation of th
itself. Trauma remains obscene, off-stage, out-of-sight. In th
Beckett's writing remains attuned to precisely what is disrup
the traumatic encounter, resisting the temptation to fr
contextualise it within familiar or conventional frameworks of
understanding. As readers and audience members we never witness 'that
time,' that singular moment which seems to re-emerge with each voice
and each story. The originary traumatic moment hovers on the
borderlines of presence and absence, expressed in the work via strategies
of repetition, fragmentation, and narrative ambiguity.
"never the same after that"

That Time is structured around three voices, A, B, C, and a Listener who
does not speak. The Listener's face is brightly lit, ten feet above the stage
platform, while the rest of the theatre remains shrouded in darkness.
Listener is described as having an "Old white face, long flaring white
hair as if seen from above outspread" (Beckett 2009b, 99). The stage set-
up is notably similar to Beckett's earlier play, Not I: there is the
minimalist environment that rejects the familiar surroundings of realist
drama, the focus on a specific region of human anatomy (a human head),
118 Rhys Tranter
and the use of a monologue to recall pa

with the already minimal props of Wa
Krapp 's Last Tape to concentrate on the
form and its relationship to langu
vocabulary that is vague and ambiguou
historical moments. The first voice heard
that time you went back that last ti

there where you hid as a child whe
day took the eleven to the end of the
trams then all gone long ago that tim
the ruin still there where you hid as a c
left in the place only the old rails wh
(Beckett 2009b,
The opening speech sets the tone for th

number of interpretive obstacles. For in
no punctuation (with the exception of s
lack of a formal sentence structure mak
narrative according to discrete units of
or segments, but are compelled to consid
voice of A is written without discern
without any obvious signals of a beg
instead, with the impression that we are h
without access to whatever introductory
We are compelled to take in the first
declaration. The passage refers to a s
childhood, a day referring to the obs
return to a derelict ruin. Ironically, wh
words that are read or heard in a strictly
images and things confounds temporal
linear understanding. For example, the i
"that last time" is undermined by wha
that." Because the last three words are
assertion of a specific time slips into a
What is most striking about the pass
temporal references. Time is explicit
prompts Listener to remember the past
becomes important once again when
progression ("took the eleven to the en
Beckett's That Time and Trauma Memoir 119
gradually shifts toward references that break down temporal d

"and on from there no no trams." It is tempting to read the
synecdoche of the metropolitan city here, an icon of techno
regulates and is regulated by time; and so, the movement to a
no tram can reach implies a crossing of temporal boundaries,
reaches of historical and cultural modernity. The presence o
emphasises this idea of temporal suspension, evoking a space t
defined by standardized time: it is a space beyond the territ
modern city, a location beyond the last stop of the trams. Yet, th
does not suggest a simplistic return to the past, to a ti
technology. There is a traumatic element to the opening pas
fragment of a narrative that speaks of a possible threat and
vulnerability ("the ruin still there where you hid as a ch
distinguishes Beckett's text is the way it acknowledges the p
presence and absence as a key attribute of traumatic experien
case, we have the implication of traumatisation without
attempt to represent it, or make it present.
Much of Beckett's writing is 'about' traumatisation of on
another, but in a way that implies motion, repetition and circ
OED defines the term 'about' as an adverb suggesting somethi
"over or around; in various directions; in a circuitous course;
(also referring to things scattered over a surface) up and dow
there." Thus Beckett's work is simultaneously 'about' tr
approximate to it. That Time conjures the apparition of a
encounter through its symptoms and repercussions, but the e
remains, like the emanating source of the voices, off-stage an
continuity. The only stabilizing reference-point for the chil
ruins, a site that deconstructs our grasp on time. Once again,
audience members are presented with symptoms of some laten
encounter without its manifestation. What is made p
performance are allusions, images and symbols that carry th
traumatic resonance, but which cannot offer a stable, secure
understanding. The site of the ruin is an exemplar of this str
whereby place and identity, the means on which me
autobiography depend, are brought into radical uncertainty. I
the term 'ruin' recalls the condition of a building or building
of collapse: a collection of structures built in the past, w
partially exist in the present. But the existence of a ruin is p
in that it invokes both destruction and remains, and thus the
of a thing in a continual and unresolved process of collapse. R
120 Rhys Tranter
signal the return of the past, but th

unending process that occurs in the pas
to the logic of Beckett's traumatized dr
Immediately following the first state
this time from C, which breaks the exp
The distinction is made clear for the re
B and C are, according to the stage dire
and "relay one another without solution
two 10-second breaks" (Beckett 2009
distinction between the three voices "m
to the audience, suggesting either a "th
"threefold pitch" using mechanical assi
contains no trace of the first, and appe
an alternative narrative that presents se
when you went in out of the rain alw

that time in the Portrait Gallery in off
rain slipped in when no one was look
shivering and dripping till you foun
down to rest and dry off and on to h
(99)
This second passage might continue a thread from the first, where "when
was that" is resolved by "when you went in out of the rain." But there is
no evidence to confirm this assumption. The voices heard by the Listener
appear to lead into one another, weaving narratives together in a way that
ruptures chronology and prompts unusual juxtapositions. From the
ambiguous memory of a ruin visited during childhood the text suddenly
speaks of a Portrait Gallery on a winter's day. The second narrative can
therefore be distinguished from the first by its distinct images, and the
audience might assume that it takes place some time after the first
narrative (since the first relates to the protagonist remembering events
from childhood). However, despite the elements that distinguish the
second scene - a man taking cover from the rain - there are nonetheless
certain echoes from the first. For instance, the action of the man seeking
shelter from the winter weather is analogous to the action of the child,
finding refuge in the ruin; while the implied threat of the first narrative
is not present in the second, the man is still compelled to hide from
observers, to enter "when no one was looking." In both narratives, the
shelter takes similar forms. Both sites enact a conversation with the past,
but a past that can only be grasped via fragments, much

fragments spoken by the voices to the Listener. The after-effec
traumatic encounter arise in a plurality of times and spaces, bu
the Listener nor the audience are granted access to the origina
itself.
Voice A continually references standardised time, along with the
timetables that govern modern transport and an industrialised
contemporary landscape. For instance, when the character returns to a
site of childhood significance, it is framed by the arrivals and departures
of ferries and trams:
A: that time you went back to look was the ruin still there where
you hid as a child that last time straight off the ferry and up the
rise to the high street to catch the eleven neither right nor left only
one thought in your head not a curse for the old scenes the old
names just head down press on up the rise to the top and there
stood waiting with the nightbag till the truth began to dawn
(102)
The character's understanding of his environment in the first narrative is

defined against the backdrop of the city and an unspecified surrounding
landscape. His understanding of time is, by turns, densely regulated by
modern transport, and strangely suspended by zones outside the city
limits. The traumatic event, or events, transpires outside conventional
notions of time, at an unclear and ambiguous juncture. (It is appropriate,
then, that the hiding place amid the ruins is beyond the reach of the
modern city.)
In the narrative of voice c there is the Portrait Gallery as an
historical archive, with its repeated references to art, representation, and
cultural history. The character is confused and disorientated, seemingly
unable to distinguish between himself and others:
C: when you started not knowing who you were from Adam
trying how that would work for a change not knowing who you
were from Adam no notion who it was saying what you were
saying whose skull you were clapped up in whose moan had you
the way you were was that the time or was that another time there
alone with the portraits of the dead black with dirt and antiquity
and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century
122 Rhys Tranter
wrong not believing it could be you t

at closing time
(102)
Adam, the First Man of Judeo-Christian tradition, is used to imply both

a confusion of identity and a playful rejection of religious origin stories.
Alone with the portraits, the character looks over representations of those
now long dead, observing labels and frames that attempt to clarify
distinctions between art and reality, or the present and the past. Identity
is hinged upon an ability to distinguish such labels, and like the first
narrative, the character struggles to differentiate between the present and
the past. At an earlier moment, his struggle to make distinctions is
crystallized by the appearance of a ghostly form: "where gradually as
you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared
had you swivel on the slab to see who it was was there at your elbow"
(100-01). As C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski have suggested, the
sudden perception is ambiguous: is it a reflection of his own face, of the
guard that has arrived to put him out, or a composite of the two? (569).
The ambiguity surrounding the perception might be read as the
ambiguity of perception itself. In That Time we are never granted access
to the traumatic event itself, only its echoes and reverberations, which
take the form of ambiguous, loosely-patterned repetitions. The form of
Beckett's play represents a series of symptoms, or clues, but no originary
event, no final signified. In the context of contemporary trauma theory,
the separate voices and their ambiguous observations suggest an inability
to tie representation once and for all to a specific referent.
Representation, of the self and of others, is instead characterized by
ghostliness.
The third voice we hear, B, articulates a narrative that seems spectral
conjuring images of fields and fringes, margins, borders, and liminal
spaces:
B: no sight of the face or any other part never turned to her nor
she to you always parallel like on an axle-tree never turned to each
other just blurs on the fringes of the field no touching or anything
of that nature always space between if only an inch no pawing in
the manner of flesh and blood no better than shades no worse if it
wasn't for the vows
(102)
There is the hint of romance in the third narrative, a comp

described at a moment of separation. The companion
permanent distance from the protagonist: no touching or "pa
manner of flesh and blood." At best, the passage suggests a re
that lacked intimacy; at worst, the companion is little more than
of imagination. Just as the portraits in the art gallery are "dead b
dirt," the human figure of the narrator's companion is s
darkness and obscurity: "no better than shades." In each of the
the character appears to struggle to make distinctions in
whether he is establishing who he is, or the differences betw
and non-reality, present and past.
Three Voices
What are we to make of these strange, competing voices, each
supposedly emitted from the same unified source? What can it tell us of
the Listener, whose facial expressions seem to lend corporeal weight and
gravity to the pronouncements? It is tempting to read the three-way
narrative of the play as a disjoined and inharmonious stream of
consciousness, a selection of three separate narratives that are rendered
explainable by the existence of a single voice, a human narrator who can
secure a fixed and stable origin. Ackerley and Gontarski have suggested
that the Listener "echoes the theater audience's piecing together
fragments of a ruined past into a comprehensible narrative, a life" (570).
In an essay on fragments and form in Footfalls and That Time, Enoch
Brater states that the texts allow us to "experience a fragment as an
absolute whole," and, moreover, to observe that this whole is fully
"materialized and memorialized through a constant return to the same
sights and the same sounds" (1977). And, discussing the play's
composition, Gontarski writes that the whole represents the "memories
that belong to the visible head" (1980, 112) Memories are thus rendered
synchronous with presence, with the visible, with the representation of
the human subject. In these readings, fragments are understood as parts
of a completed whole, signalling a deferred unity, a promise of full
presence. But does this analysis tell the whole story? Do the fragments
that comprise That Time really add up to more than the sum of their
parts?
Whilst the presence of a single humanist subject allows the
narratives to flow and cohere, the voices and their separate accounts
remain strangely inharmonious. Even if all memories and articulations
are issued from a single source, how do we account for this plurality of
124 Rhys Tranter
voices, memories, and fragments? It is i

any other, that Beckett's play becom
assumptions of the standard 'traum
challenge to its dependence upon con
identity.
A short essay by Maurice Blanchot, entitled "Marx's Three
Voices," may help to illuminate what is most problematic about That
Time. In it, Blanchot suggests that a tripartite logic underlies the writing
of Karl Marx:
In Marx, and always coming from Marx, we see three kinds of

voices gathering force and taking form, all three of which are
necessary, but separated and more than opposed, as if they were
juxtaposed. The disparity that holds them together designates a
plurality of demands, to which since Marx everyone who speaks
or writes cannot fail to feel himself [í/c] subjected, unless he is to
feel himself failing in everything.
(98)
From this, we might deduce that the voice, as Blanchot defines it, exists
both within the writing subject ("In Marx") and beyond it ("always
coming from Marx"): we might interpret this any number of ways, but it
can be useful at this stage to suggest a distinction between an assumed
temporal present ("In Marx") and, conversely, the implicated reference
to the past or the future ("always coming from Marx"). The voice, in this
sense, deranges our sense of time, and of the assumed self-presence of
the rational subject. This is complicated further by Blanchot's
identification of three distinct voices underscoring Marx's texts, three
voices that simultaneously evoke clarity and coherence alongside a sense
of divergence and plurality. Blanchot, of course, is referring here to a
branch of political discourse, but his analysis can have a more general
impact on our understanding of the voice in drama. There is, after all, a
similar principle at play in Beckett's text. The voice in That Time
occupies multiple subject positions and, in Blanchot's words,
"designates a plurality of demands." We are compelled to remain
attentive to the play's variances and fluctuations: patterns and repetitions
across the monologues suggest coherent connections between them, yet
they remain simultaneously singular and separate. The essay, which goes
on to align the three voices of Marx's discourse with the structure of
writing itself, might hold implications for our understanding of traumatic
narratives. Blanchot writes that his example suggests "that t

writing, a voice of ceaseless contestation, must constantly dev
and break itself into multiple forms" (99-100). At the po
articulation, the voice that signals trauma is similarly de
fragmented, blurring distinctions between subjects and objects
places. The problem of representing trauma in Beckett'
connected to wider problems surrounding the Western s
impossible demands of remembrance, the inadequacies of rep
tion, and the incompleteness of belated fragments. As in
narrative seems to be the product of a repetition-compulsion,
and unceasing story that circles around a traumatic event, bu
precise vocabulary with which to signal an approach, or r
trauma. Language, the system by which we understand the w
ourselves, also acts as a barrier restricting mastery over past e
The multiplicity of voices A, B and C are brought together
more than spectral ambiguities. A connects spectrality to an
obsolete modernity, a modernity defined by ruin and derelict
the other voices bring similar ideas to bear on their separate
the B narrative, the individual disappears with the sunset: "ti
see it no more nothing stirring only the water and the sun going
it went down and you vanished all vanished" (Beckett 2009b,
voice of C is concerned with the way the individual is pe
others: "you might as well not have been there at all the eye
over you and through you like so much thin air was that the
that another time another place another time" (105). Each vo
towards a divided self, a self split into many fragm
undifferentiated parts. The protagonist in each narrative is su
deferred among their material surroundings, and finds it di
establish a clear or precise existence.
Significantly, Blanchot's essay on Marx finds its way int
Derrida's work, Specters of Marx, in which Derrida illuminat
temporal instabilities inherent to writing and the voice. Refer
three voices of Marx, Derrida suggests that they are de
"necessary disjunction ," and characterized by a "non-contem
with themselves" (40). Whilst the humanist subject might ap
fixed and unified source of meaning, spoken and recorde
exceeds all claims of a temporal present, or metaphysical pre
Derrida puts it elsewhere, "the order of the signifie
contemporary," but "discrepant by the time of a breath" (19
such, the voice that symbolises claims to harmony or un
126 Rhys Tranter
humanist subject diverges and disperses

This, too, is the defining feature of th
that forbid even the possibility of 'that
for closer inspection. The voices are not
in performance (they are heard from
2009b, 105), but each refers to a diff
historical moment. If remembering, re
depends upon an established correlation
three voices disrupt not only our claim
understanding of language itself: "What
to, here as elsewhere, concerning this
still assign here an unlimited scope to th
heterogeneity, an internal untranslatab
40).
Specters of Marx draws further connections between Blanchot' s
writing and the concept of a spectral, ghostly voice. The figure of the
spectre, in this context, forbids standard binary oppositions of present
and past by an appeal to the future; the logic of the spectre obeys a similar
logic to the traumatic event, manifesting itself always at a later time
according to unspecified and unpredictable criteria. The figure of the
ghost signals not only the return of a past traumatic event, but
destabilizes Western categories of time, presence, and ontology. Derrida
describes a voice that "can never be always present, it can be, only, if
there is any, it can be only possible, it must remain a can-be or maybe in
order to remain a demand" (39; emphasis in original). Traumatic
representation in Beckett's texts follows a similar logic, always belatedly
manifesting itself through a series of allusions or spectral traces, but
never fully present, never graspable. In contrast to the standard 'trauma
memoir,' treatment of That Time's unspecified traumatic event(s) serves
to unsettle and destabilize our understanding of the humanist subject as
a coherent and stable identity testifying from a singular and fixed
position.
The final passage of the play, which finds the protagonist seeking
shelter in a quiet library, is delivered by C. The narrator states that only
two sounds can be heard, the character's breathing and the soft sound of
"the leaves turning" (Beckett 2009b, 106), a phrase that synchronizes the
quiet practice of reading with the shifting of the seasons, and the cold
approach of autumn and winter. Reading, then, signals a kind of ending,
perhaps even a death. Suddenly, the protagonist is overwhelmed by dust,
"the whole place suddenly full of dust [...] from floor to ceiling" (106).
The library, an archive of Western science, philosophy, and li

crystallized by an image of decay, ruin, and collapse. Ack
Gontarski have identified a possible connection between the p
dust and the character's sense of mortality and non-being
specifically on "God's admonition of Adam, 'dust thou art
shalt thou return' (Genesis 3:19)" (570). What strikes me m
about the final passage is the way the dust that overwhelms t
provokes the last questions of the narrator. The play clos
interrogative tone, unable to distinguish the dust of the
repository of language) with the identity of the self, or its pl
"only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come an
that it something like that come and gone come and gone no
and gone in no time gone in no time" (106). The disinte
language and the archive coincides with the disintegration of
subject.
That Time, then, is a play that complicates our relationship to
history. Presenting us with the memories of an ageing man, three voices
evoke a number of different and discontinuing selves. Whilst the play
performs a lifetime, it is a life that remains at a distance, unseen in the
shadows. As an anniversary piece, That Time does make us reflect on
history: but it makes us reflect on the constructed narratives of history,
of what it records, and what it cannot help but leave behind. The play
does not make the past present, but disorientates notions of a linear,
chronological history, and confuses our ability to isolate singular
moments or events. That Time both inaugurates and unsettles a new era
of traumatic narrative, of autobiographical memoir, anticipating its
purposeful formal inconsistencies while deconstructing the assumptions
that hold it together. The play effectively stages a unified humanist
subject that is distanced from itself, from its voice and the accounting of
its own testimony; its three voices - issuing from three unknown sources,
in three different pitches - pluralize and complicate claims to a singular,
rational account. That Time is, to adapt a line of Beckett's Proust (19), a
plurality of times, suggesting a plurality of places, and a plurality of
selves.
Works Cited
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett:

A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove,
2004).
128 Rhys Tranter
Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogu

John Calder, 1965).
-, Company, III Seen III Said, Worstward Ho
(London: Faber, 2009a).
-, Krapp 's Last Tape and Other Shorter Pl
Blanchot, Maurice, "Marx's Three Voices
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 199
Brater, Enoch, "Fragment and Beckett's Fo
JOBS 2 (1977), 70-81.
Web: http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/n
Accessed July 2015.
Derrida, Jacques, "The End of the Book an
Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakrav
Hopkins UP, 1997), 6-26.
-, Specters of Marx : The State of the Debt,
International , trans. Peggy Kamuf, in
Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Gontarski, S. E., "'Making Yourself All Up
Beckett's That Time" in Modern Drama 2
Kennedy, Seán, Introduction, in Samuel Beck
Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss (Lon
1-10.
Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The
Bloomsbury, 1996).
Luckhurst, Roger, The Trauma Question (L
Moorjani, Angela, The Aesthetics of Loss
1992).
Rothberg, Michael, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust
Representation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).

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"WITHOUT SOLUTION OF CONTINUITY": Beckett's "That Time" and Trauma Memoir

Author(s): Rhys Tranter

Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.

Time, Trauma and the Self

protagonist's memories themselves app

"deepest Western traditions of self-knowledge and humani

"never the same after that"

and the use of a monologue to recall pa

that time you went back that last ti

The opening speech sets the tone for th

gradually shifts toward references that break down temporal d

signal the return of the past, but th

when you went in out of the rain alw

but a past that can only be grasped via fragments, much

The character's understanding of his environment in the first narrative is

wrong not believing it could be you t

Adam, the First Man of Judeo-Christian tradition, is used to imply both

There is the hint of romance in the third narrative, a comp

voices, memories, and fragments? It is i

In Marx, and always coming from Marx, we see three kinds of

narratives. Blanchot writes that his example suggests "that t

humanist subject diverges and disperses

The library, an archive of Western science, philosophy, and li

Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett:

Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogu

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