ABSTRACT
Beckett’s world has remained remarkably consistent. His first published work in 1929 already talks of ‘this earth that is Purgatory’. The fiction that has appeared since 1961 is what Beckett calls ‘residua’, what remains, as he explained to me, both from larger original wholes and from the whole body of his previous work. Beckett’s shorter fiction has inevitably received less attention than the longer works owing to its early inferiority and its later difficulty. In particular the association Beckett makes between women and death in ‘Assumption’ is developed more fully in his subsequent fiction. Behind Beckett’s paradoxical attitude to love and sexuality lies his vision of man’s suffering condition. Texts for Nothing represent Beckett’s penultimate attempt in fiction to explore his own existence in the first person in a world ‘where to be is to be guilty’.
