Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett’s Narrative Poetics

Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett’s Narrative Poetics is the first book to examine Samuel Beckett’s trilogy and post-trilogy works, specifically in terms of their divergent approaches to narrative subjectivity. By comparing the narrational processes of Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable, Paul B. Kelley demonstrates that the negativity informing the trilogy has its underpinnings in Beckett’s Proust. Culminating in the narrative aporetics of L'Innommable, this negativity is subsequently overcome in experimental fashion in post-trilogy works such as Textes pour rien, Comment c'est, and Compagnie. The result is a poetics of exhaustion whose pivotal significance for the Beckettian subject is explored.