ABSTRACT

With each of his successive radio plays, Samuel Beckett offered an ever-more intense study of the isolation of the individual from society. Rough for Radio I is one of his most extreme expressions of such alienation. Here the listener is presented with a character, simply named He, who occupies a nondescript interior, and a scenario that abandons any sustained development of plot or character. This absence of remarkable detail or dramatic action might result in the work’s total oblivion were it not for its most striking quality: despite being a portrait of isolation, Rough for Radio I is an open-ended text.