Beckett for Beginners (Samuel Beckett's Work‪)‬

I Samuel Beckett's work, in whole and in part, intimates that beginnings are not only arbitrary but creel--cruel because they are arbitrary and also because they are exclusive, selecting one point of entry and focus at the expense of others. Endings, by contrast, are simply imperative, and have the option of being creel. As a beginning, both cruel and arbitrary, to this discussion, I submit that the argument about classifying Beckett as a "modernist" or a "postmodernist" is ultimately an ethical one. Upon this platform of an idea, which in the first part of this essay I will endeavor to assemble, I will advance the corollary thesis that the uncategorizable--or, if you will, "'unnameable"-nature of Beckett's work and the challenge that work poses to teleological epistemologies and especially to allegorical readings make for especially instructive study at this point in history, when many of us are looking for the exit from the postmodern. This simple idea can be put more plainly: in trying to get out of something, it is often helpful to reflect on how one got in in the first place.