ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer has demonstrated how a psychoanalytic perspective can illuminate works of contemporary theatre in his essay on Pinter's plays, published in Sincerity and Other Works. This chapter provides some of his ideas in the discussion of Samuel Beckett, who was Pinter's most important forerunner and exemplar in the contemporary drama. The point of Beckett's choice of Chaplinesque or Keatonesque figures as his two central characters must have been that audiences could identify with them as stylized representations of ordinary vulnerable citizens in a senseless world. The problem, to which Beckett's method in this play was a solution, is what has been described as the impossibility of representing in art the terrible sufferings of catastrophes such as the two World Wars and the Holocaust. Beckett lived through the war in Occupied France. It seems crucial to Beckett's method not to allow his audiences the mental comfort of references to circumscribed, recognizable events.
