Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms
and themes of Beckett's critical and creative writings. He shows that Beckett's aesthetic
preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauer's seminal arguments regarding the
arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human
affairs. While Beckett's critical writings are in places formidably opaque this work
examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with
Schopenhauer's arguments are revealed. Using Schopenhauer's thought as a presiding
interpretative framework Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and
theological ideas in Beckett's creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions
than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas
were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends. A central contention of
this book is that to judge the place of ideas within Beckett's art we should ignore questions
of their theoretical persuasiveness and consider their role as purely aesthetic devices the
value of which is revealed in terms of the existential impact they have upon his characters. In
each of the chapters that deal with Beckett's fiction Barron underscores the artistically
energizing tensions that exist between the concepts that Beckett's characters invoke in their
attempts to comprehend the import of their experiences and their conative and affective
tribulations which invariably prove resistant to such analysis. Here the means by which such
conceptual aporias engender semantic potentialities underpin an exploration of Beckett's
creative assimilation of rational discourse. While the focus of this publication is upon
Beckett's early and middle fiction which was composed at a time when the relationship between
the chaos of quotidian ordeals and the value of rational thought became most acutely relevant
for him numerous cross-references to his dramatic and poetical works are provided in order to
highlight the overall significance of these issues within his oeuvre.
