Essay: Beckett’s Individualistic Approach to Absurdity

Sample Essay

Absurdity comprises in enduring confrontation, it is a contradiction and a struggle. It can be faced only through laboring with it and contradicting with it. That is why, as Camus states, to consign suicide means to acquiesce with absurdity, it means to give in, because the sense of life is looked for in another world. None of Beckett’s individual characteristics commit suicide or pass away in any way. It appears that it is unrealistic to get away from the absurd destiny, to stay here means to face it, to commit suicide means to consent to it, and thus it should be accepted (Chabert, 1982). That is the cornerstone of human freedom. Absurdity does not have any sense, does not have any causes, any aspires, and that is why it does not contemplate yesterday, neither tomorrow. The absurd man misses any wants, designs, and problems about his future. He is recommended only as an instant and that is what his flexibility comprises of.  The only way how to paralyze absurdity is to not inquire for reasons (Esslin, 1986).

As a young man, Beckett also experienced this sense of absurdity and meaninglessness in the modern world, but, unlike his modernist predecessors, he could not even muster faith in his art or in language. Thus, while Joyce could revel in the possibilities and textures of the written word, Beckett could not. Instead, he reduced his fictions, his plays, and his poems to the barest elements, and, throughout his career, he tried to rejoin art and life in his own way. For the pre-modernists, art imitated the world beyond the human mind. The modernists rejected this idea of imitation, and so did Beckett. Instead, his art reflects the inner world, the world of the human voice, the only world human beings can ever really experience. In the pre-modern era, art was successful if it depicted some truth about the world. For the modernists, art succeeded only on its own terms, regardless of the world beyond the scope of the arts (Cronin, 1996).

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