Editing Samuel Beckett (section)

===Middle period===
{{Quote box |width=300px |align=right|quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center
 |quote =<poem>
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world's woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?
</poem> |source =From ''[[Watt (novel)|Watt]]'' (1953)<ref>''Watt'' by Beckett quoted in: Booth, Wayne C. (1975) A rhetoric of irony By Wayne C. Booth, [[University of Chicago Press]], p258 {{ISBN|978-0-226-06553-3}}</ref>}}
After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with the "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which he realised that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today.

During the 15 years following the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: ''En attendant Godot'' (written 1948–1949; ''[[Waiting for Godot]]''), ''Fin de partie'' (1955–1957; ''[[Endgame (play)|Endgame]]''), ''[[Krapp's Last Tape]]'' (1958), and ''[[Happy Days (play)|Happy Days]]'' (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "[[Theatre of the Absurd]]"—deal in a [[black comedy|darkly humorous]] way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary [[existentialism|existentialist thinkers]]. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and ''Godot'' were centrepieces of the book. Esslin argued these plays were the fulfilment of [[Albert Camus]]'s concept of "the absurd";<ref>Esslin (1969).</ref> this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labelled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded [[absurdism|his own philosophy]]). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.<ref>Ackerley and Gontarski (2004)</ref>

Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in ''Endgame'' who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarise the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."<ref>''Endgame'', 18–19</ref>

[[File:Waiting for Godot in Doon School.jpg|thumb|250px|Beckett's ''[[Waiting for Godot]]'' is considered a hallmark of the Theatre of the Absurd. The play's two protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon (pictured, in a 2010 production at [[The Doon School]], India), give voice to Beckett's existentialism.]]

Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels [[Molloy (novel)|''Molloy'']] (1951), ''Malone meurt'' (1951; ''[[Malone Dies]]'') and ''L'innommable'' (1953: ''[[the Unnamable (novel)|The Unnamable]]''). In these novels—sometimes referred to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes—the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down.<ref>Ackerley and Gontarski (2004) p586</ref> ''Molloy'', for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel (time, place, movement, and plot) and it makes use of the structure of a [[detective novel]]. In ''Malone Dies'', movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an [[Inner monologue|interior monologue]]. Finally, in ''The Unnamable'', almost all sense of place and time are abolished, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing, and its almost equally strong urge towards silence and oblivion. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of ''The Unnamable'': "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on".<ref>''Three Novels'', 414</ref>

After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as ''Texts for Nothing''. In the late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, ''Comment c'est'' (1961; ''[[How It Is]]''). An early variant version of ''Comment c'est'', ''L'Image'', was published in the British arts review, [[X (magazine)|''X: A Quarterly Review'']] (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form.<ref>"L’Image", X: A Quarterly Review, ed. [[David Wright (poet)|David Wright]] & [[Patrick Swift]], Vol. I, No. 1, November 1959 [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/beckett/career/howitis/publications.html Beckett Exhibition Harry Ransom Centre University of Texas at Austin] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402190345/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/beckett/career/howitis/publications.html |date=2 April 2015 }}</ref> This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching [[telegraphese]]: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark"<ref>''How It Is'', 22</ref> Following this work, it was almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. ''How It Is'' is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer.