ABSTRACT
In That Time and A Piece of Monologue, Beckett continues his assault on the structures of identity offered by the dominant forms of representation. The texts of both plays exploit and subvert the structures of monologue and autobiography which traditionally support the concept of self-hood. While in many of the plays considered so far, the forces of authority requesting evidence of identity have been externalized, the struggle between the Symbolic law and the subject’s experience of lack and fragmentation is here located more explicitly within an individual psyche. In That Time and A Piece of Monologue, as in much of Beckett’s late drama, this struggle emerges through the interaction between the performative subject who repeatedly attempts to articulate his/her experience and the symbolized fragments of his/her existence. In particular, both plays focus on the destabilization of the textual and visual frames used to figure the subject and [his] history.
