Reading Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable as a Poststructural Narrative

Reading Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable as a Poststructural Narrative

Questioning lies at the core of Samuel Beckett's fictional worlds. In The Unnamable, the thinking ability of the Cartesian I is questioned from the very beginning. In this way, any established certainty about self-identity, space (place and time), the Other, and, more importantly, language is questioned. Despite that, the whole narrative reveals an unending desire to "go on" so that the unnamable narrator or voice might finally find an internal peace, a sense or meaning. What differentiates him from the modernist characters is his ultimate disbelief in language in both rendering an ultimate meaning or signified and communicating his thoughts to the outside world. However, he is not a postmodern absurdist too. Being aware of the true function of language and the ubiquitous presence of the Other, he is still willingly looking for the possible ways in order to define, as well as understand, himself. True that Beckett was not the initiator of philosophical contemplation on human beings' being and existence, he can undoubtedly be taken as the first writer who addressed the already existing epistemological and ontological questions in highly literary forms.