The Uncertainty In Beckett's Watt

Samuel Beckett, one of the greatest playwrights in the 20th century, enjoys great reputation around the world. Moreover, he secures his position as the first important postmodern novelist owing to his relentless attempts at the dissolution of form and subjectivity, and his great concern for human condition. The novel Watt, written during the World War II, claims its transitional significance in the whole span of his life experience and literary career, thus a detailed study of Watt is crucial to a better understanding of the development of his novels and his artistic credos.With a study of the uncertainty in terms of the narrative structure and the thematic concern, this thesis centers on the author's exploration regarding the form and the content in his writing, and highlights author's insistence on the dissolution of subjectivity by deconstructing human consciousness and language, which, to a large extent, anticipates the post-modernity in his works.In Watt, the narrative structure frames itself in a broken circle, lingering in the process of repetition and contradiction; the incongruous and intermittent narrative voices overlap and complicate each other in a deconstructive activity; and layers of uncertainties in narration test and challenge the authenticity of human knowledge.In accordance with that, the subjectivity suffering from the division between mind and body is dragged into the unconscious exploration, which results in the incapability of differentiating facts from imaginations, the outer world from the inner world. Moreover, the obscurity of identities, combined with the failed identification among people, leads eventually to the collapse of epistemology, the crisis of language representation and the dissolution of subjectivity.In pursuit of the principle "form is content, content is form", Beckett experiments with all possible forms, and even deconstructs form itself. Descartes'rationality and mathematical reasoning are put to extreme use so as to achieve another end—uncertainty. With the dissolution of rationality that Descartes sees as the basis of knowledge, Beckett considers chaos as the carrier of everything in the world, while impotence or absurdity becomes the major element or material. Uncertainty can also be found in Postmodernist expression or writing as the basic reality in this modern society. Different from Beckett's early novels, Watt withdraws from the realist description of the outside world to the unconscious exploration; and the blurring signifier chain of language destabilizes its capability of representation and differentiation, giving way to a kind of "inexpressibility" or "silence".The self quest, in such an uncertain and absurd world, is doomed to be a journey of failure, for the meaninglessness and inaccessibility of existence frustrate every attempt. Nevertheless, men are always on the journey of waiting and struggling.