"REJECTING THE FEASIBLE": Discourse and Subjectivity in The Perverse Project of Beckett's Early Fiction

Beckett's early fiction retreats from the all-inclusive, encyclopedic scope of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, instead seeking the minimal conditions necessary for the survival of narrative, or even of utterance itself. The resulting formal experiments lead to insights into the structure of Beckett's material – in this case language and narrative form – which impose themselves as that material is taken to a kind of limit. By refusing conventional narration, retreating from conventional significance, and ignoring accepted hierarchies of relevance, Beckett's narratives join Susan Stewart's category of critical "nonsense" texts which "[make] conscious aspects of context that would remain unarticulated in everyday life and the fictions of realism".