World of Samuel Beckett

"The World of Samuel Beckett" brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough", Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision". Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness.