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Abstract

Though suicide is referred or alluded to in many of Beckett’s works, it has not received much scholarly attention. This paper attempts to trace how the representation of suicide in Beckett’s oeuvre has evolved over the years, and how his teleplays in particular mark the culmination of Beckett’s thoughts regarding suicide. Where modernist literature attempts to show identification with and understanding of suicide, Beckett deviates from this trend by instead focusing on the impossibility to identify or come to terms with it. His early to middle period works reach this conclusion humourously, emphasizing the fact that there is nothing to be done about it. His teleplays, however, make the impossible move to go one step further, all the while acknowledging the impossibility to go any further; in other words, despite the unknowability of the Other, a move towards the Other is made nevertheless. In Beckett’s works, this inevitable failure is not a source of despair, but rather an occasion for a fleeting smile that smiles at the failure. Through this non-commitment, through the refusal to identify and interpret the suicidal mind, Beckett perhaps suggests the most ethical representation of suicide.