ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 provides an exploration of repetition in Beckett’s aesthetic in terms of the semantic fluidity that underpins much of his later prose. In this chapter, repetition is viewed as a salient feature of Beckett’s later aesthetic, one influenced, in particular, by his Schopenhauerian philosophy of music. Beckett’s employment of musical repetition would become much more complex in his later prose, no more so than in Ill Seen Ill Said (1981). Whereas the music in Murphy is relatively “intelligible”, the repetitive nature of Beckett’s later prose employs the “inexplicable” (Beckett quoting Schopenhauer, 1931, repr. 1971, 92) nature of music by providing a method of writing a “non-specific” text, to use Alec Reid’s term, without clear meaning (Reid, 1968, 34). In his later prose, in other words, exact meaning erodes, through the use of repetition (Cohn, 1980, 96). The musical metaphors of Murphy are replaced by a more formalist approach, whereby alongside the introduction of notation in the text, the author began to experiment with a more “musicalized fiction” that would permeate The Trilogy (1951–53) and later prose. The chapter culminates in a close analysis of four distinct types of repetition in three separate Beckett excerpts.
