ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 discusses Beckett’s place within Irish literature before outlining the author’s developing aesthetic of music in his early fiction. Beckett was greatly interested in music. An accomplished pianist, the presence of music in his work manifests itself in three distinct ways. First, actual musical quotations, such as those from Beethoven and Schubert, inhabit his texts. Second, structural devices such as the da capo are metaphorically employed. And third, and perhaps most striking, yet most neglected in terms of scholarship, is the development in his later prose of something I term “semantic fluidity”, an erosion of explicit meaning brought about through an extensive use of repetition, influenced by Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music. Early texts like Murphy (1938) frequently use musical metaphor and show early signs of the repetition device. It is important to contextualise this work in terms of Beckett’s merging of literature and music, as this was not an isolated endeavour but instead fed into a rich arena of intermedial experimentation during the twentieth century.
