Samuel_Beckett

Samuel Beckett Essay Samuel Beckett was a depressed author whose literature has baffled the human mind. His plays and books made people say things like this doesn't make any sense or ask "Why did he write that'"Hope this will answer all of your questions in this essay it’s talking about how his life and things going on around him and to him affected his writing. Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday in Dublin Ireland april 13 1906 he was raised in a middle class and very strict protestant home.His mother and father were: Mary and William Beckett.His mother liked to spend good quality time with her kids wither they were training or just doing hobbies with them and their father spent time with them by going fishing and playing golf and showing them his love for nature.Beckett was a very smart boy he started to learn how to speak french at the age of six.He attended the Portora Royal boarding School.He was the light heavyweight Champion in wrestling and he also wrote for the school newspaper . His first doodles were of hobos and tramps and in “Waiting with Godot” two of his characters were hobos.His teachers said that he was moody and withdrawn. When he was ten years old it was the beginning of the civil war between Ireland and Britain,also during world war one his uncle was fighting with the British army.Samuel seemed to say the he had a good childhood but unhappiness surrounded him.It’s sort of like the endgame when the character seems positive but they aren’t happy about whats going on they are gloomy maybe he’s trying to relfect his true inner self some way or another because he says he happy but not happy about the things going on around him.Also in Endgame Hamm was always happy as he told the stories but he was always complaining about whats going on around him . In 1928 Beckett moved to Paris and he loved it there.At the age of 24 Beckett won his first literary prize of 10lbs for a poem called whoroscope. Samuel went to trinity college and studied french and Italian and his grades were so good that they gave him a job working as a professor’s assistant but soon after he gave up his job to live a nomadic life.He went to Ireland,France,Germany and as he traveled he wrote poems,stories,and while he was on this adventure he saw tramps, hobos and wanderers and he eventually used these people as some of his characters in his books. After he was finished traveling he decided to go back to Paris and settled down in 1937 shortly after he was back in Paris he was stabbed by a man on the street who went up to him for money.After this happened he went to the prison and asked the man why he stabbed him and the man replied ‘I don’t know”. The man was so lost and confused that this later became the basis of characters he used in his plays.This traumatic thing that he went through affected his writing because since the man didn’t understand why he did it Beckett thought that his stuff shouldn’t have to make any sense either.Like in Endgame when the characters would talk they would talk for a really long time and they would have long pauses for no reason . During World War Two Beckett still stayed in Paris even though they were still occupied by the Nazis .He joined and fought for the resistence until 1942 in this time his fellow comrads were arrested so he fled with his wife to the unoccupied zone.In 1945 they returned to Paris and he began his most important period of writing in his career so for the next five years he wrote:Eleutheria,Waiting for Godot,Endgame he also wrote the following novels Malloy,Malone dies ,The unamable and Mercier et caminar two books of short stories and one book of criticism. Beckett secured his spot as a dramatists on April, 3rd, 1957 when his second masterpiece(The Endgame) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in london.The funny thing is even though english is Beckett’s native tongue he wrote all of his plays in french and he didn’t rely on the regular elements of drama.Beckett was the first absurdists to win international fame and his works has been translated into over twenty different languages and he was also awarded the nobel peace prize in 1969 for literature and he continued to write but the job got harder as time went on he said that each word seemed to him as a unnecessary stain on silence¬hingness. (.http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc7.htm) So throughout his travels and experiences he went to many places and had been through many things and the things he saw affected his writing because when he saw the hobos and tramps and saw they way they acted. He eventually used them for characters in his plays for example in waiting for Godot two of the characters are hobos.His experiences affected his writing when he got stabbed in Paris by that one man and his experience in the prison with the man who stabbed him gave him his basis for his characters.Therefore if he didn’t see the things he saw and the did the things he did he wouldn’t have been a successful playwright or author. Bibliography http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc7.htm ://www.notablebiographies.com/Ba-Be/Beckett-Samuel.html