ABSTRACT
Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones invites the reader to construct or maintain the notion of an enormous mechanical cylinder in which naked people are trapped for eternity. If The Lost Ones is viewed not as an allegory but in the context of other contemporary works using machines as metaphors for the act of writing and as explorations of the symbolic, mysterious interface between humans and machines, then other properties, cybernetic ones, become visible. Like a perpetual-motion machine, The Lost Ones is a palpable fiction which, even as its inventor attempts to complete the blueprint, collapses into impossible meaninglessness, self-contradiction, and absurdity. The fallibility of the cylinder-machine lies in the fact that it is constructed of words; the author's attempt to describe it precisely becomes an exercise in failing epistemology and in the futility of trying to describe anything using language.
