Words and Music: The Role of the Musical Elements in Samuel Beckett's Works

Abstract

Christopher Butler . . . writes with regard to the French avant-garde author and film producer Alain Robbe-Grillet: "[any] reliance upon past habits of reading and writing . . . is once more to be renounced, in favour of free invention and that phenomenological investigation of the artist's own processes". The same might have been written with reference to Beckett, to whom, after the war, the use of facets of art such as images, sound, music, silence, composition and choreography appear to become equally important to the use of language and words in his writing.