英文摘要 |
”The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day”. Similarly, as an aesthetic ideal, ”naught”-or ”nothingness, ”-is not achieved once and for all time in Beckett’s writing. In Beckett's trilogy especially, the world, both internal and external, are emptied out of its significance and eventually collapsed into silence. This suggests that Beckett’s trilogy focuses on the relationship between linguistic aporia and the predicament of (human) existence. His strategy of writing is to disintegrete and debunk the objects that we thought to be truthful.First, in order to demonstrate how the trilogy upsettles the reader's presupposition of the form/content divide of narratives, I analyze three aspects of the trilogy: first, ”stories” that do not represent any given reality; next, ”story-telling” that is delivered by an unidentifiable voice; finally, Beckett’s ”play” with language. In my view, Beckett does not intend to produce a so-called ”truthful” story because of his understanding of the linguistic aporia inherent in all story-telling. On the contrary, the failure of language, or the impossibility of representation, has become the aim and purport of Beckett's literary creations.Second, the first-person narrator ”I” in Beckett's trilogy becomes but a verbal construct whose presence in the trilogy connotes neither the existence of an external world to which the ”I” belongs nor the reality of an ”internal” world that can render ontological certainty for the ”I.” Given the ontological certainty is no longer ensured by the functioning of language, the narrative of The Unnamable is hopelessly trapped, as well sustained by, by this aporetic search for the ”I.” Finally, I argue that form and content are closely integrated in the Beckett trilogy. Despite his disappointment with the failure of language, he nevertheless makes this failure a theme of his writing to register the double bind trapping modern people, a double bind that, Beckett seems to suggest, becomes the very structural principle of his tilogy. |