The Fragmented Subject: Absurdism, Deconstruction, and the Crisis of Human Identity in Beckett

Abstract

Samuel Beckett is known worldwide as a dramatist whose plays question the traditional assumptions of meaning, certainty, rationality and stability. One of the main issues that his drama brings up is the presentation of the human self as fractured, non-confident and undetermined. The characters in Beckett often have ambiguous behavior, experience isolation, erratic memory, dependence and a lack of freedom, all of which are destabilizing your identities. The sketchy nature of the data Beckett gives on his characters adds to the feeling of their incompleteness, of their ambiguity. This following research investigates the concept of disjointed subjects in Beckett's plays such as Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape. It looks at the construction and representation of identity from a deconstructive point of view, based on Jacques Derrida's ideas about instability, absence, difference and the refusal of "definiteness of meaning". The paper also explores the ties between language and identity, focusing on the ways repetition and silence, gutters and dead silences, circular dialogue, and stutter, mutilation, and breakdown of speech apply to the impossibility of coherent and comprehensible selfhood. In addition, the use of absurdist structures in Beckett's work to depict the crisis in human life – meaninglessness, purposelessness, confinement, dependence and illusory choice – is considered. The analysis sees Beckett's characters as having no fixed identities and continually in a state of fragmentation and reconstruction. Finally, Beckett's piece of theatre calls into question the notion of a unified self and proposes that identity is rather flexible, relational, incomplete and contingent upon language, memory, the absence of something, and context changing.