Paper Topic

If something has captured and held my attention above all else in this class, it has been the work of Samuel Beckett. My journey from the first moment I picked up the book and thought, “What the heck, how could anyone possibly read this?”, to now enjoying, appreciating, and understanding it in my leisurely time, has been one fraught with incomprehension, mind blowing epiphanies, sleep-ridden eyes, and laughter. So naturally I am eager to spend even more time with this trilogy and connect it more fully to the themes of the class in my final paper.

My first thought that emerged when contemplating this topic, was the fascinating paradox between the emptying out in Beckett’s writing, the Kenosis, and what the typical expectations of literature tend to be i.e. to fill one up. But I want to go further than a kenosis vs. plerosis discussion and delve into the theme of Life as Fiction and Language, as well as the unavoidable, ever present theme of the Eternal Return:

“in my head I suppose all was streaming and emptying away as though a sluice, to my great joy, until finally nothing remained” (Beckett 224)

“For even as I said, How easy and beautiful it all is!, in the same breath I said, All will grow dark again” (Beckett 224)

I’d like to explore the idea that to become enlightened you must expose yourself to the mechanics, the lies, the falsities, and the darkness. Is it necessary to descend into the darkness in order to ascend back into the light, to follow the cyclical pattern? How unlikely it seems to find truth and enlightenment in the dark. And also to go along with the mechanics of storytelling and fiction, questions of how we are shaped by the words of others, and the dependence we have on books to lead us into that darkness, to strip us and then enlighten us again. Would we survive if we “drowned” our books?