Where dose one start with Beckett?

Murphy, Goddot, Endgame, Krapp's, Trilogy, Watt.

He's a writer of extraordinary talent. A lot of his texts are oppressively dark and sealed-in, but to me they're like expertly crafted and beautifully engineered machines. He wrote in French and translated back into English in order to be a stranger in his own language long before deleuze was talking about minor literatures. its also really interesting to witness how his style develops from piece to piece - there's a constant elimination of the human in favour of the mechanical, autonomy in favour of permutation, diagrams instead of symbols. He raises up everyday objects such as bicycles or tinopeners as works of art in themselves, and reduces his characters to the status of toys being played with by a sometimes brutal and petulant child who wants nothing more than to rip their dolls limb from limb.

How do you feel about Bernhard?

I liked Godot a lot. What should I read if I want a better understanding of his inspirations ? I've heard that he has been influenced by Joyce but who else ?

Dante is a huge inspiration apparently.

Some guy on YouTube was talking about how he was influenced by Quietism.

Apart from that he was a big guy for Proust, Schopenhauer and Andre Gide

Not an expert by any means tho. I'm not the user you replied to

As the other user mentioned, Dante is a looming presence in Beckett's works. A lot of philosophy too - Schopenhauer, Descartes and Thomas Aquinas are the most obvious. It's also fun to read Beckett as a giant middle finger to Freud. His later dramatic stuff even draws on mathematical models - I once read a fascinating article about Quad (look it up on YouTube, utterly bizarre) which read the permutations of the players in terms of fractal patterns.

Who has Beckett influenced?

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for the answer. I've never heard of Quad but the limits of language is one of the themes which interested me the most in Godot so I'll definitely look it up.
Could you elaborate about what you said about Descartes ? He's the writer you named I'm the most familiar with but I don't really see the link with Beckett's work (even though it's probably because I haven't read enough of said work).

Never had much experience with him
myself, but a few of my peers have described a number of thematic correspondences between them. Where would be a good place to start?

I don't want to say with certainty he was inspired by Descartes, but for me texts like watt and the unnameable embody reducto ad absurdum the problems surrounding rational scepticism and the Cartesian self respectively. Watt subjects Mr Knott's house to such absurd scrutiny it becomes a space of total incomprehensibility, while the unnamable attempts to eliminate all extreaneous features of the self through sheer exit velocity, similar to watt but with a much greater sense of fatalism and self-annihilation. The irony is that both essentially end up exactly where they began: watt arrives back at the train station, and the unnameable ends with "I can't go on, I'll go on". no matter how hard they try, rational doubt gets them no closer to the truth.

a side note to Quad: a lot of critical attention on the piece has focused on Beckett's role as a musical composer. So it's not only the limits of language which are strained: his work frequently maps out the compacted space between sound and speech. How it is explores a similar idea with its torture-music machine, where a man repeatedly jabs a tin opener in another's arse to make him scream.

Also you might be interested to note that Clovv's movements on stage in endgame are supposed to imitate a Knights tour of a chessboard, which opens up a whole other can of worms about programme languages and such.