‘The End’ by Samuel Beckett, translated by Richard Seaver and Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s handful of short stories are all masterpieces. ‘The End’ inhabits a universe like that of Malone Dies, which is to say it is futile and decrepit but also shot through with moments of flaring lyricism and colours that briefly bloom in grey. It is about a narrator discharged from an indeterminate institution of the psychiatric type, and his efforts to find his way through an uncanny psychogeographic landscape of rejection, exile, and nebulous memory. He’s forever looking for lodgings, forever moving from one place to the next, until he finds himself literally at sea. It is very sad, but there are some great jokes. There is a type of joke that Beckett excels at, where he builds an elaborate and often profound bait and destroys it with a brutal and obscene punchline, timed to perfection. I think the finest example of the form is in this story. It cracks me up. It goes as follows:.

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.