Beckett, in his works, tried to explain the search for human identity in a godless universe by reconciling an empiricist approach with the mood of black comedy.
Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He became famous as the most interesting representative of the Discord theater with his plays. He was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin. His parents, Mary and William Beckett, were people from the Protestant middle class of Ireland. Beckett began his education at Earsfort House School in Dublin in 1912. He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in 1920. He entered Trinity College in Dublin in 1923 and studied at the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literature. Beckett, who was interested in Dante while he was a student, went to France and Italy during the summer holidays and reinforced his interest in the literature of these countries. After completing his higher education in December 1927, he taught French briefly in Belfast in early 1928, and in October of the same year, he started working as an English lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense.
He met James Joyce in Paris, who would greatly affect his writing life, and entered his circle of friends. He helped translate a portion of Joyce's obscure novel, later published as Finnegan's Wake, into French. In the same period, the first review written to promote Joyce's latest work was signed by Beckett and was titled "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress".
Published in 1930, his poem called Whoroscope, consisting of ninety-eight lines and seventeen footnotes, was his first published work. He returned to Dublin in September of the same year and became a French assistant at Trinity College. He received his master's degree in December 1931 with his thesis on Descartes' philosophy and decided to leave his assistant job and devote all his time to writing. Returning to Europe in 1932, Beckett lived in London between 1933 and 1937, making frequent trips to Germany and France. More Pricks Than Kicks, consisting of stories he wrote during this period, was published in 1934, and his novel Murphy was published in London in 1938. He settled in Paris in 1937. When World War II broke out, he returned to France from Ireland, where he had gone on vacation, and joined the French resistance movement. Wanted by the Nazis, he fled to the south of France, staying in Vaucluse for two years. He was a farm worker during the day and wrote his novel Watt at night.
After the war ended in Ireland for a short time, he joined the Irish Red Cross group and returned to France, and settled in Paris again. Thereafter he began to write only in French, and between 1946-1950 Molloy completed a trilogy of novels Malone meurt ("Malone is dying") and L'mnomable ("The Unnamable"). Beckett, who had previously translated Murphy into French, translated these novels into English himself. Again, Eleutheria, one of the plays he wrote during this period, was never published or played. En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) created a theatrical event with its debut at the Theater de Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953, and was soon translated into many languages, making Beckett internationally famous. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
Beckett, who entered his writing life with poetry, tried to explain man's search for his identity in a godless universe by reconciling the mood of black comedy with an experimental approach in his early works. This search for identity has also formed the content of his later works, which reflect the human condition in minimized persons and decor. His first play, Waiting for Godot, caused long discussions wherever it was played and was defined as Pascal's Thoughts as a music hall show by Fratellini clowns due to the intensity of its intellectual content and its closeness to the tradition of the buffoon. Beckett's characters find themselves in a situation that they cannot understand, between crying and laughing. This mood of black comedy balances the intense hopelessness and pessimism found in Beckett's novels as well as his plays and creates an interesting sad comedy genre. The striking simplicity of the environment in which the events took place also reinforces the pain of the people involved in losing their identities, the vague sense of guilt and hopelessness that they cannot get rid of.
Waiting for Godot, two idle circus clowns are in a nude scene, under a leafless tree, waiting for someone they don't know named Godot. These two friends, whose names are mentioned in the game people list as Vladimir and Estragon, call each other as Didi and Gogo. At the end of the first episode, the messenger boy, who announces that Godot will not come, addresses Vladimir as "Monsieur Albert". During the game, these two people have nothing to do but wait. They use various ways to pass the time: While trying to remember their past, they also discuss the possibilities of Godot, tell jokes to each other, say what they can remember from the Bible, eat, and pee. The arrival of a man named Pozzo and his servant named Lucky is an important innovation for them in this waiting period. However, the humiliating nature of the relationship between master and servant causes them to develop a new sense of fear and disgust instead of consolation. In the second act, four or five green leaves appear on the tree. However, Didi and Gogo's waiting power has decreased, their memory has weakened, and there is little they can say to console each other. When Pozzo and Lucky come again, Pozzo's eyes are blinded and Lucky is speechless. Godot declares that he will not be able to come again that day. Didi and Gogo try to hang themselves from a tree but are unsuccessful. As at the end of the first act, they say they want to go from there, but they can't move. The wait will start again.
Beckett is followed with great interest in literary and theater circles, as he is one of the brightest representatives of English and French, where his works are often difficult to understand, but he treats human reality with great consistency and uses it with the same ease.