Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett's Not I

Abstract

WHEN THE CURTAIN RISES ON NOT I, Samuel Beckett's most recent work for the stage, the first thing we are aware of is a disembodied human mouth, seemingly suspended eight feet in the air, trapped in the harsh glare of a spotlight amid the surrounding darkness. The long line of partially disembodied characters in Beckett's drama makes its first appearance with Nagg and Nell in Endgame; having crashed on their tandem in the Ardennes and lost their shanks, the two now inhabit dustbins. Whatever else they may represent, the ash bins (or dustbins) are clearly death images, symbolically apt containers of decaying human flesh, linked with the grave via such traditional Biblical images as "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3.19). In Happy Days, the process of disembodiment has gone one step further. At the beginning of Act I, Winnie is discovered interred in a mound of sand up to her waist; by the second act, however, the mound has reached her neck, thus obliterating her entire body except for her head. This mound of sand is, once again, a brllliantly conceived icon of death-in-life; figuratively and literally, Winnie has both feet in the grave, and the rest of her must inevitably follow. The three characters of Play are likewise imprisoned up to their necks, in vases which Beckett specifically labels "urns," thereby evoking both the ashes of cremation and the tomb. All that remains of their bodies are their faces — "Faces so lost to age and aspect," Beckett directs, "as to seem almost part of urns." And in Not I, there is no longer even the entire face, but simply a mouth, chattering compulsively. By now we know full well what disembodiment signifies in Beckett's drama; there is no longer the need for an implicity coffin-like receptacle.