Introduction

Samuel Beckett's Mulloy listens, "and the voice is of a world endlessly collapsing." It is the voice of modern literature. Beckett takes us into the vertiginous heart of the wasteland. His heroes seek "the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness." The violence and suffering in Beckett's world are continuous and monotonous–without change, like endless monologuizing of novels themselves. Beckett's heroes are confessors in the line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike Jean-Jacques, they have lost faith in the integrity and authority of their being, but they retain the absolute devotion to self of the modern confessor. Jean-Jacques' antinomian belief in the privileged status of his character did not prevent him from being the most guilt-ridden of men. The seeds of the modern situation are already in failures of the heroes of the cult of the ego. But the heroism of earlier writers was precisely in their effort of resistance: moral, religious, aesthetic.