Late Beckett is the pinnacle, for me. The materials at his disposal diminish with age, through choice or disposition, as told here:
from
‘Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again’.
to
‘Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there’.
What he discloses of the human predicament, ‘talking to himself in the last person’, extends in inverse proportion to the narrative constraints he places upon himself. Extraordinary consolation.
First published in English in 1964; collected in The Complete Short Prose 1929 – 1989, Grove Press, 1995
