Samuel Beckett Absurd Existentialist or Portrayer of Humanities Unsaid Desires?
Bearing Witness to one’s own Existence
Samuel Beckett’s non-verbal tendencies are fundamental to his creative vision. In a period where man sought to find new methods of understanding the world, Beckett’s poetically structured drama served as a metaphor concerning the nature of human existence.
In order to begin to understand Beckett’s work, we need to look at the context that surrounded his writing. Beckett emerged into a world torn apart by War, where man wondered at the meaning of life after the horrors and atrocities of Auschwitz, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The Existentialist artist believed that art was not about teaching, but about bearing witness to one’s own existence, art’s purpose was to merely be; therefore existence was purely to exist. (Carlson, 1993, 415)
Beckett belonged to a group of dramatists given the name ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ a smart literary slogan that a number of writers including Martin Esslin, academic scholar and professor of drama, used to classify the new style of drama. They believed that the world was disordered…
