Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

Jonathan Boulter's study argues that Samuel Beckett's novels not only thematize the reading process but in various ways are "about" the reader & the process of interpretation, or hermeneutics, as well. Building on seminal work by H. Porter Abbott & others whose first premises have been largely passed over by the Beckett critical community, he reads the early to middle novels of Beckett (Watt; Mercier & Camier; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable; & How It Is) in the light of phenomenological-hermeneutical theory, primarily that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Boulter demonstrates how Beckett's novels illustrate & examine issues central to philosophical hermeneutics: the notion that the self inhabits or is inhabited by a linguistic world, that one must understand one's condition through language, that the self is ultimately at a distance from itself because it is mediated by language. Boulter reveals that Beckett's texts are inhabited by narrators & characters who are allegorized versions of the actual reader. Adapting such concepts as Gadamer's "conversation" & "phronesis" & Ricoeur's "appropriation," Boulter works through the major novels showing how each is, in turn, a stage of Beckett's development of the subject. From an exploration of the relation between the title character's failing language & the obligations of the reader in the face of an unreadable discourse in Watt to an explication of a generalized thematization of the hermeneutics of being in How It Is, Boulter charts a middle course between the allegorical & textual extremes of contemporary Beckett criticism. He shows that these novels, in short, are about the philosophical-hermeneutical grounds of understanding, a theme that has received scant attention in Beckett criticism. Beyond his account of the novels, Boulter offers a concluding chapter that points the way to a fruitful hermeneutical analysis of Beckett's drama & later prose (Endgame, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho).Boulter, Jonathan is the author of 'Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett' with ISBN 9780813021065 and ISBN 0813021065.