Publisher's Synopsis
Naming Beckett's Unnamable examines Samuel Beckett's major prose (1946-1970) in a unique way - the Nouvelles, the trilogy, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, and The Lost Ones, as well as other remarkable, shorter pieces. Breaking new ground, Adelman does not profess affiliation to any school of Beckett criticism. The main point explored by Adelman is Beckett's debt to Kafka - the ways in which Kafka's stories, artistry, concerns, and life (as a literary persona) stand behind Beckett's prose. Kafka's struggle with spiritual deadlock helped Beckett, at crucial impasses in his own art, to find his way to Molloy and the trilogy, and later, to discern the importance of torture to the creative imagination, especially in How It Is. Adelman is sensitive to Holocaust images and tropes in Beckett's poetic language from the trilogy to The Lost Ones. Yet in The Unnamable Adelman also discovers, beneath the novelistic experimentation, a hero's quest for the sacredness of the self in a world become inimical to the sacred.
