Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers

HEN Samuel Beckett said, with comprehensible exasperation, to an importunate French interviewer, "I never read the philosophers; I don't understand what they write," he was not telling the strict truth. He was, of course, quite right to insist that there is no handy key, existentialist or logical positivist, to his work; but this does not mean that he has not read widely and deeply in philosophy, or that he has not borrowed heavily, if quite eclectically, from the writings of many philosophers. Although useful work has already been done on this important and interesting subject, I do not believe the true nature and full extent of Beckett's debt to philosophy has as yet been adequately explored.' Not only Beckett specialists but comparatists generally need a more detailed and exhaustive treatment of this problem. In this article, I shall consider the philosophers who have influenced Beckett in chronological order, from the Presocratics to Leibniz and Hume.