I don't get it. It's just meaningless rambling without any real plot or characters...

How far in are you? I almost quit in the Molloy section, but I found the Moran section much more readable and interesting. I really liked Malone Dies. I had enough momentum to carry through The Unnamable, though it was definitely a struggle.

>Is it an actual story in french or what?
kek

technically the differences between his original and english versions aren't frequent other than that of the language, which is indeed very frequent

I'm at the Molloy section and I want to quit too. Glad it gets better, but my patience is going.

it's postmodern

Malone dies is really good. Especially his hidden critique of wittgenstein.

"How it is" is the logical consequence

>hidden critique of wittgenstein.
redpill me on this

somewhere in "Malone dies" he references "The world is all that is the case" and ironically displays it with the alienated relationship with the nurse

I loved it for some reason
It got me into an alienating trance that made me laugh and dread life at the same time

Unironically you might just be too dumb. The trilogy is magnificant

Awful modernist wankery prose
U2
Reaganomics

Ireland was a mistake tbqh

Not super sure about the DFW point, but I definitely am starting to feel like Woolf was one of the few good modernists (though I think a lot of Faulkner's work definitely warrants recognition, and I think that a lot of Rilke's later work is also decidedly modernist).

I've slowly been coming to the realization that I really didn't get anything out of Ulysses, aside from it just being like a cool puzzle at times. And a good deal of the lines that I thought were cool as hell and worth remembering are just allusions. Though admittedly "A heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" is raw as hell.

Each book in Beckett's trilogy is progressively less coherent, it feels like drifting off

It's not meaningless at all and it certainly doesn't ramble.

is the french here more difficult than in waiting for godot? i was able to read that one without great difficulty, but the sentences were very short.

Its probably one of the most challenging reading experiences outside memey shit like Finnegan's Wake

this isn't a modernist work you retards

Nope brainlet. I'd say Beckett's work is specifically the death of modernism. It suggests post-modernism but remains emphatically a modernist work

beckett is often called "the last modernist". multiple courses about modern literatures that ive seen end with him.

can someone explain why that is?

How can you be so emphatic and at the same time not know what you're talking about?

yeah....and you're biologically related to your wife's child. lol

Beckett announces a twofold death, that of the subject and that of narrative. it is not correct to call the Trilogy a properly modernist work; it is squarely against expressionist tendencies and arrives at an opaque indeterminacy of language. it is also not precisely postmodern in the sense associated with DFW, Barth, Pynchon et al., which are more maximalist, fragmented, and metatextual, though there is a line emanating from Beckett to the nouveau roman (which is considered by Jameson and others to be postmodern)

would you label it as
i) a proto-postmodernist novel
ii) a modernist novel with postmodernist tendencies?

I would absolutely call it the latter. There's too much struggle with distinctly modernist concerns to declare it postmodern. It still has a fight in it to the very end as opposed to the castrated resignation of Post-Modernist works

It's infinitely sad in a mellow and beautiful way

It's definitely not for everyone and The Unnameable especially is extremely avant-garde. Maybe try it again some other time when you know what to expect?

I would just like to point out what this thread is sort of illustrating by way of example: there is a lot of debate surrounding Beckett and his status as a modernist or postmodernist writer. IMO he can't really be situated firmly within either idiom. He's one of those authors that advocates of both camps try to claim. Nabokov is another example here, although Nabokov has novels that to me feel more modernist (Lolita) and others that are unambiguously postmodern (Pale Fire). Beckett is a little trickier, although his style did change dramatically overtime. Personally, I feel that Beckett's work is more modernist, although he certainly influenced the black humorists of the 1960s. I would agree with what has been said about him in this thread and elsewhere- that he is the "last modernist" or at least the last significant one.

>"How it is" is the logical consequence
Props on mentioning "How It Is". Great and underrated novel. I've never seen it mentioned on Veeky Forums before.

Why are anglos so obsessed with categorization? It's so pointless, not to mention great writers can hardly be incapsulated in these autistic categories.

It's pretty cut and dry that he is not a postmodernist. The question is how modernist he is, which can only be properly granted as post-Joycean.

>It's just meaningless rambling without any real plot or characters.
that's right. it's total shit.
He realized he'll never be able to me a master of knowledge like joyce so he set out to do the opposite.
He gives you legos instead of puzzle pieces.

Because we're not effeminate hermaphrodites too intimidated by the challenge of consistent thought

>Reads no more than 50 pages
>Has to tell Veeky Forums how boring it is
Stop.