What's the deal with this book?

>try to be Joyce
>fail
>starts writing like Timothy Dexter instead
What did Beckett mean by this?

The whole trilogy just gets better as it goes along. Not being a contrarian but Godot is my least-favourite Beckett. "Not I," "Play", "All That Fall," "Krapp's Last Tape" and the novel trilogy are all Zeus-Tier. His first novel "Murphy" is pretty damn great too. Godot always seemed like a practice run for his later plays but it's the most "accessible" to normbos.

The first and best post-modernist. Joyce was additive, so Beckett was subtractive.

I remember reading that he wrote Waiting for Godot as a kind of relief whilst in a kind of creative blockage between Malone Dies and The Unnameable.

Explain why

Murphy is tripe. The later novellas are good, though.

cucks

yes

is Beckett just a meme?

No.

Absolutely not, he's arguably the definitive writer of the 20th century. At least the first half, moreso than Joyce even. Storytelling amidst the bombed ruins of everything humanity previously held up as important.

His plays are good sometimes, but the trilogy is a total meme.

the trilogy anticipates many of the trends of postmodern and experimental literature, from the nouveau roman to authors including David Markson and Thomas Bernhard. The Unnameable is arguably the starting point of postmodern literature (or at least, the logical conclusion of modernist literature)

Beckett is a parasite on literary history and especially on early 20th century maximalism (as embodied by Joyce). No one, reading Beckett without any context or prior knowledge of literature, would give him the importance in literary history that he has been given. That's not to discredit him as a writer or to say that you can not enjoy his works, but he's not made better by his opposition to certain other literary traditions and methods

>No one, reading Beckett without any context or prior knowledge of literature, would give him the importance in literary history that he has been given.

Fuck me, that makes no sense. I hope you still understand what I mean

nah, too late, you've been disregarded.

What? Beckett is the complete opposite of 'maximalism'. His writing is a radical break from the modernist legacy.

If Rodin had sculpted in bone and flesh, old man Beckett would be his masterpiece.

Old man Beckett and Joyce most aesthetic looking writers desu.

>Trilogy
>Twin Peaks

there's still some good left on this board

My sincere recommendation is that you check out some online resources (summary first, then analysis). I had trouble when I read this for a class, but research and class discussions really helped. Unfortunately, the discussions on this site will never be as high quality as those in a classroom (although you will collect some nuggets of wisdom).

I fucking love Watt

then why are all the excerpts of his writing so shallow like Faulkner and Camus’ versus Joyce and Melville where every paragraph oozes divine inspiration? post something good from Beckett and I’ll reevaluate, im unconvinced. Even Burroughs seems more talented
I have Endgame sitting in front of me, is it worth going through?
see this worries me, when people have gay obsessions with authors outside their works i start to think they’re memes. DFW memes made me realize he was a hack, no titan is made fun of that much. Even Kafka can’t be properly mocked, neither can Pynchon besides appeals to his aimless writing. But Beckett seems like he’s actually a faggot who rode on other people’s coattails prove me wrong. Post something exquisite, this is a lit board you all had better have excerpts at the ready

>gay obsessions
please, don't read Beckett. I'd rather you not.

muh peitit-bourgeois sentiments of proper speech

samuel-beckett.net/lessness.html

nah, i'd just really rather you not read beckett. you won't get anything out of it.
clearly.

That wasn't me you're just an annoying faggot and I read Beckett in highschool

Just don't read any more, at all.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms

Endgame is his best play but honestly just watch it don't fucking read it, watch the Michael Gambon/David Thewlis version, its on youtube in shit quality thats for certain

“I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. These things, what things, come from where, made of what?”

Frankly, you're a pleb if you think that Beckett rode on anyones coattails. He rejects Joyce rather early in his career and what he carved in his life was among the most unique of any literary men of all time.

>Burroughs
>Talented