Samuel Beckett and the problem of beginning

Regarding chess, Samuel Beckett made the following assertion: once the pieces have been arranged, any move you make immediately weakens your position. The best move, consequently, is not to move at all. In his attention to beginning, Beckett departs from his most immediate precursors, Joyce and Proust, and in so doing defines a new type of literature for the second half of the twentieth century. The anxiety and ambivalence of much post-war fiction, with its distrust of narrative and closure, have their roots in Beckett's exploration of beginning and his elevation of that category to the status of ultimate dilemma. The rise of failure as a dominant mode of expression, as both an aesthetic and a moral imperative, derives likewise from Beckett's belief in the absurdity of commencement and the impossibility of atoning fully for it.;This dissertation has its origins in the debates over ending that are staged principally in the work of Frank Kermode and Peter Brooks. These two critics have defined modern literature's concern with both the revelatory function of ending and the legitimacy that ending bestows upon the process of storytelling. These theories of narrative, which apply remarkably well to the majority of modernist novels, fail to capture the extent to which Beckett's insistence on beginning operates as a means of distinguishing himself from his most significant precursors, both ancient and modern. The second critical work that is significant to my argument is George Steiner's Grammars of Creation, which extends from Kermode and Brooks, but in the direction of origins. Steiner argues that the twentieth century, particular after 1945, has lost faith in the concept of ending. His phrase for this realignment is the "eclipse of the messianic." In my discussion of beginning, I use Steiner's concept to define Beckett as the first writer to pursue a literature that is hostile to its own moment of initiation. Drawing on these sources and others, this dissertation refocuses contemporary debates over Beckett's literary practices as well as his place in literary history, arguing that his reconsideration of the modernist principle of ending constitutes a turning point in modern literature. Beckett's distrust of beginning leads ultimately to developments in the novel that have been carried out by authors such as B.S. Johnson, Alasdair Gray, and Lawrence Durrell.