Innovation in Samuel Beckett's Fiction

Readers often find Beckett's fiction forbidding because he abandons conventional methods and introduces new formal devices. In Innovation in Samuel Beckett's Fiction Rubin Rabinovitz, a pre-eminent Beckett scholar, provides comprehensive descriptions of those devices, explains how they are used, and clarifies how they contribute to Beckett's underlying ideas. As an example, Rabinovitz points out that more than 1,000 significant elements recur in Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. These emphasize elusive ideas, such as the mysterious affinities of thought linking the protagonists in these works or suggestions that different characters represent aspects of a single embryonic persona who is never explicitly described. Rabinovitz also discusses Beckett's use of narrative, chronology, setting, characterization, allusions, mythic parallels, and figurative language.