ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the satiric form is established and the effects of that form on the reader’s relationship to the narrator and his story. Watt offers a grotesque but highly stylised comedy set in a recognisable world. Beckett’s interest in the automatism of gesture and attitude in the opening of Watt is similar to Sterne’s and the interest is a continuing one. In Watt, Sam has an equally bland insensitivity, both to his subject-matter and to his possible audience, in a passage on the innocent garden diversions that he enjoyed with Watt during their time in the asylum, and the reader experiences an equal consternation. The formal implications have to do with the collapse of structure which makes the experience of reading Watt so strange and even at times unnerving.
