Watt: Deconstruction Of The Realistic Narrative Tradition

Samuel Barclay Beckett is remarkably visible as the leading non-realist western writer in the first half of our century since the output of Waiting for Godot which has transformed him from an obscure avant-garde writer to a world figure.Even though Beckett himself refused to offer any explications for his work,he has been enlisted by scholars into both a paradigmatic modernist and a paradigmatic post-modernist for the centering of diminishing human capacity and diminishing language in the texts which adhere respectively to the existentialist humanism and the linguistic focus of deconstructional theory.Notwithstanding the overwhelming influence of James Joyce,Beckett moves in a counter-Joycean direction---towards the simplicity,compression and disminishment.The contours of the Beckett terrain is about the impotence and ignorance instead of the art of omniscience and omnipotence with experimental natures regarding to the language and style.Watt is the third English novel Beckett wrote after the completion of Dream Fair of Middling Women(which was posthumously published in 1992)and Murphy.After Watt,Beckett switched to the French writing and finished his renowned trilogy of novels: Molly,Malone Dies and The Unnamable which showed his turning to the form of interior monologue as the desire for self-excavation.In Watt,Beckett delineates a protagonist Watt looking for meaning and identity in a phenomenal world but dooms to fail for the absence of a rational and powerful subjectivity presence.The shedding of allusions and third-person narrative voice for a much more inward and immersive first-person and the exploring of the limitations of languages in Watt serve as a turning point for Beckett to start his experimental writing and first attempt at meta-fiction.In this thesis,the focal point will be primarily put on the exploration of deconstructive aspect in terms of how the novel deconstruct the realistic narrative tradition with the tool of Derridean deconstructional theory and narratology.The experimental novel breaks with the convention of traditional realistic novel and proceeds to question the essential subjectivity underlying the language and narrative.The ignorant Watt and impotent Knott divert from those rational verisimilitude characters in traditional realistic novels which are based upon the thinking modes of “Logos”.Except for a constant stable authorial voice,the first narrator Watt and second narrator Sam(also the implied author),with their impotence and incapability,not only subvert the traditional image of a stable omniscient third-person narrator but also aggravate the unreliability of the text.What's more,the broken circular structure and the vague mirror-writing of Watt,Knott and Sam in the text(the trinity of character,narrator and implied author)have eschewed the traditional realistic novel in which a narrative with the sense of continuance and control is of primary significance.Subjectivity dissolution,as the salient feature of Beckett's work,manifests itself implicitly in Watt in the form of the breakdown of an old established narrative order,the dissolution into paratactic language and the enumeration of the incomprehensibility.From Decartes came the anxious skeptical probing of rationality,Beckett,as the real author of Watt,aims to break the convention of body-mind dualism and Cartesian logo-centricity tradition,relentlessly pursuing the trajectory of disjunctional and indeterminacy-oriented writing.Watt signifies Beckett's discard of Joycean heritage and the switching to experimental writing in pursuit of nihility and inexpressibility.The reversal language and mirror image in the text demonstrate Beckett's dedication into “mirror writing” which has reached a culminating point in the trilogy of novels.