Impotence and making in Samuel Beckett's trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and How it is

• Main Author: Pauline J. Shaw
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: Other creative arts and writing not elsewhere classified; Studies in the Creative Arts and Writing not elsewhere classified

This thesis explores the questions of impotence and making in Samuel Beckett' s trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and How It Is. I am particularly concerned with how the male characters, though repeatedly declared to be impotent, somehow conceive, gestate and bear others who are in many ways like themselves. For Beckett, I suggest, the question of reproduction is an endlessly difficult one. In seeking to engage with it, I set Beckett in the context of the historical, social, religious and philosophical tensions of twentieth-century Europe with regard to reproduction, paying particular attention to eugenics, the First and Second World Wars, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and the post-War world that produced poststructuralism. To help make sense of this material, I draw heavily on the theoretical work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, the literary critical work of Leslie Hill, Steven Connor and Mary Bryden, and the biographical studies of James Knowlson and Lois Gordon.