Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which period he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and his style more minimalist.
Early works
Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by the work of his friend James Joyce: they are deeply erudite, seeming to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection
More Pricks than Kicks (1934) affords a representative sample of this style:
"It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular."
The passage makes reference to Dante's
Commedia, which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. At the same time, however, there are portents of Beckett's later work: the physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy of the final sentence.
Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel,
Murphy (1938), which also to some extent explores the themes of insanity and chess, both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later works. The novel's opening sentence also hints at the somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new'.
Watt, written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes, but less exuberant in its style. This novel also, at certain points, explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later preoccupation...in both his novels and dramatic works...with precise movement.
It was also during this early period that Beckett first began to write creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number of short poems in that language, and these poems' spareness...in contrast to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period, collected in
Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)...seems to show that Beckett, albeit through the medium of another language, was in process of simplifying his style somewhat, a change also evidenced in
Watt.
Middle period
After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with the aforementioned "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin...in which he realized that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world...that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today.
During the 15 years subsequent to the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays:
En attendant Godot (written 1948—1949;
Waiting for Godot),
Fin de partie (1955—1957;
Endgame),
Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and
Happy Days (1960). These plays...which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"...deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers, though Beckett himself cannot be pigeonholed as an existentialist. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and
Godot were centerpieces of the book. Esslin claimed these plays were the fulfillment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd"; this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labeled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.
Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and, indeed, incomprehensible world. The words of Nell...one of the two characters in
Endgame who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak...can best summarize the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."
Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels
Molloy (1951),
Malone meurt (1951;
Malone Dies) and
L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable). In these novels...sometimes referred to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes...the reader can trace the development of Beckett's mature style and themes, as the novels become more and more stripped down, barer and barer.
Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel...time, place, movement and plot...and is indeed, on one level, a detective novel. In
Malone Dies, however, movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in
The Unnamable, all sense of place and time are done away with, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing and its almost equally strong urge to find silence and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this a reflection of Beckett's experience and understanding of what the war had done to the world. Despite the widely-held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of
The Unnamable: 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.
Subsequent to these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as
Texts for Nothing. In the late 1950s, however, he managed to create one of his most radical prose works,
Comment c'est (1961;
How It Is). This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food, and was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark" Following this work, it would be almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose, and indeed
How It Is is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer.
Late works
Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency...already evident in much of his work of the 1950s...towards compactness that has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece
Breath, which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on
Oh! Calcutta!, the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece).
In the dramas of the late period, Beckett's characters...already few in number in the earlier plays...are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled 1962
Play, for instance, consists of three characters stuck to their necks in large funeral urns, while the 1963 television drama
Eh Joe...written for the actor Jack MacGowran...is animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the face of the title character, and the 1972 play
Not I consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, 'a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness'. Many of these late plays, taking a cue from
Krapp's Last Tape, were concerned to a great extent with memory, or more particularly, with the often forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present. Moreover, as often as not these late plays dealt with the theme of the self confined and observed insofar as a voice either comes from outside into the protagonist's head, as in
Eh Joe, or else the protagonist is silently commented upon by another character, as in
Not I. Such themes also led to Beckett's most politically charged play, 1982's
Catastrophe, dedicated to Václav Havel, which dealt relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of
mirlitonnades, some as short as six words long. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon, have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.
Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not so prolific as his writing of drama, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts
Fizzles, (illustrated by American artist Jasper Johns). He did, however, experience something of a renaissance, beginning with the 1979 novella
Company, and continuing on through 1982's
Ill Seen Ill Said and 1984's
Worstward Ho, later collected in
Nohow On. In the prose medium of these three '"closed space" stories', Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of
Company make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said."
In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his final work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, perhaps amplified by his sickness late in life.