Beckett’s first short story was published in issue 16-17 of Eugene Jolas’s magazine transition in June 1929. He was in good company — the same issue featured a section of James Joyce’s ‘Work in progress’ (later to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939). The title of Beckett’s story refers to The Feast of the Assumption (15th August) which celebrates the entry of the Virgin Mary into heaven.
Usually described or dismissed as an apprentice work, or juvenilia (the author was 22), it may be (as some critics have claimed) that this short fiction is a parody of the Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something intended to amuse Beckett’s literary mentor. Another reading is that Beckett is debunking the myth of the artist as incarnated in Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, which he does by degrading the aesthetic priorities of his protagonist, who experiences romantic agony but in a form that may be no more than post-coital depression. It’s a fascinating debut, with many Beckettian tropes already in place.
First published in transition, June 1929 and collected in Samuel Beckett: the Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, 1995
