Character life:
Samuel beckett Samuel Beckett, French writer. Born into a Jewish family in Dublin, Ireland, my father was a surveyor and my mother was a devout believer. When I was traveling in Paris as a student, I met James Joyce, a famous Irish writer who lived in Paris, and served as his secretary. 1927 graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a master's degree in French and Italian. From 65438 to 0928, he taught at Paris Teachers College and Paris University, and met Irish novelist James Joyce. Beckett, who is proficient in several languages, was appointed as the assistant of Joyce, who was blind, and was responsible for sorting out the manuscript of finnigan's Wake. His early critical works include Dante, Bruno, Vico, Joyce and Proust.
193 1 returned to Dublin, taught French at Trinity College, studied under the French philosopher Descartes, and obtained a master's degree in philosophy. 1932 roaming Europe. 1937, he wrote to his friends: It has become very difficult and even meaningless for me to write in standard English. Grammar and form! In my opinion, they are as backward as Victorian bathrobes and gentlemanly manners. And claimed to attack words for beauty.
1938 settled in Paris and published his first novel Murphy. During the German occupation of France, because of participating in the resistance movement, it was chased by fascists and forced to live in seclusion in the countryside as an agricultural worker. 1945, he returned to Ireland to take part in the work of the Red Cross for a short time, and returned to Paris to become a professional writer shortly after the end of World War II. He has a strong interest in painting art and has written a lot of comments and essays centered on painting art. After entering the 1950s, Beckett realized that his novel experiment was impossible, so he began to turn to drama creation. 1953, Waiting for Godot shocked the literary world.
1969, Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature. After he got the Nobel Prize in Literature, he accepted the prize money, but he didn't attend the award ceremony, because then he wouldn't have to make a public speech. In addition, his non-fiction works include three dialogues and broken fragments. The prologue of Beckett 1980 script is a monologue: Birth is his death. Beckett solved the existentialism that needed to be expounded for an hour at Edinburgh Drama Festival in one sentence. Although discussing human nothingness, Beckett is haggling over every ounce. 1989 65438+On February 22nd, Beckett died in Paris, France.
Writing characteristics:
Beckett's life-long creative experience is marked by the performance of 1952 drama Waiting for Godot, which is divided into two periods. I mainly wrote novels in the early stage and plays in the later stage. Nevertheless, Beckett's literary style has not changed much, but he chose a road far from the realistic tradition from the beginning.
Beckett was deeply influenced by stream-of-consciousness literature in his early years. He hates traditional realism. He once accused the readers at that time of being only willing to read works with strict separation of form and content without difficulty, but unwilling to accept works directly expressed like Joyce's novels.
Therefore, in Beckett's early novels, he seldom touched on real social life scenes and specific social problems, but devoted himself to revealing the confusion, anxiety and loneliness of human existence and the sadness that people lost their sense of autonomy in modern society. He likes to carry philosophical thoughts with fragments and fantasies of life. His novels have no coherent plot and touching stories, which are obscure and difficult to understand, just like the popular stream of consciousness novels at that time.
novel
Beckett is a pioneer in pursuing new forms of expression in novels and plays, and inherits the literary traditions of Joyce, Proust and Kafka, while his early plays benefit from1French literature in the 1990s and Guillery's Ubnoy. Beckett's novels have a unique structure. Most of his novels adopt a ring-shaped closed structure, and the plots are constantly multiplying and dissolving. The main plot is constantly knotted and torn until it is completely deconstructed by the narrative. Generally speaking, Beckett's novel creation has made some achievements. However, due to extreme language and structural experiments, his works become difficult to interpret in private writing.
drama
Absurdistan
Absurd drama is the development of absurd literature in western modernist literature. This school is considered to be the most representative reflection of post-war western social ideology through stage art. The most common meaning of absurdity is: man and the world are in a hostile state, man's way of existence is absurd, man is dominated by an indescribable alien force, he is unable to change his situation, man and the world cannot communicate, and man exists in a meaningless world. This absurd view embodies the universal spiritual crisis and pessimism in the western world.
Beckett's characters in his plays are all sick and ugly vagrants, beggars, disabled people and old people. From the tramp in Waiting for Godot, the four disabled people in the last game, Ham and his parents crouching in the trash can looking for food from time to time, to the old woman Winnie buried in the sand in Good Days, they are all human beings who have lost themselves. On the one hand, it calls for non-existent self-introduction to samuel beckett, on the other hand, it calls for self-exploration. Another basic proposition repeatedly expressed in his plays is that man is helpless in the face of death, life is absurd and desperate, and he can only go to death helplessly. Yunescu's plays describe the absurdity of reality, the disappearance of personality, the emptiness of life and the hopelessness and meaninglessness of human existence. Almost all the characters in adamov's plays are reduced to human archetypes, aiming at revealing the cruelty and indifference of material civilization. The most prominent feature of Jinai's drama is to beautify evil, turn evil into virtue, regard darkness as the embodiment of light, and turn hell into heaven. The characters in his works are all people outside the normal society, and show that everything in the world is a dream and a scam.
Personality influence:
Beckett, with his indomitable spirit and novel novel and dramatic forms, has inspired more than one generation of writers and philosophers to examine and think about themselves and the times, thus benefiting a lot. As one of the founders and masters of absurd drama, Beckett has created more than 30 stage plays in his life, of which more than 20 have been made into TV dramas or movies. The three most important works are Waiting for Godot, The End of Drama and Ah, Beautiful Days! 》。
Beckett's greatest achievement in his life is his contribution to the absurd drama. It is because of his series of excellent plays that the absurd drama can become an independent and growing literary school and join the post-modernism camp. Among them, the famous work Waiting for Godot caused a sensation when it was performed in Paris in 1953, with more than 300 performances in a row, which became the most popular play on the post-war French stage. Beckett became famous and became a man of the hour in French literature. Modern people get excited from mental fatigue because of the peculiar forms of his novels and dramas.
Just as the adjective Pinteresque (meaning Pinter style or Pinter style) derived from Pinter's surname has been included in the most authoritative Oxford English dictionary in Britain, so has the adjective Beckettian derived from Beckett's surname. But according to Pinter expert Ronald Hyman, Beckett is later than Pinter (and Pinter is 24 years younger than Beckett), which means that Pinter and Beckett have their own styles, and their differences are easy to distinguish.
Evaluation:
From 65438 to 0969, Beckett got Nobel Prize in Literature's comment: Because of his novels and plays, modern people got rid of poverty.
Beckett spent the rest of his life in France, but he never acquired French nationality. Because Beckett wrote in French instead of Gaelic, his native Ireland refused to recognize his national identity. Beckett's thinking is always European and international. Unlike his compatriots Bernard Shaw or Ye Zhi, Beckett is always narrow-minded. Although Beckett's works are still controversial, there is no doubt about his status as a first-class literary master in the 20th century. British scholar Qin Fei commented: As far as Beckett is concerned, we don't have to accept the gloomy description of life in his plays. However, his contribution to the art of drama is enough to win our gratitude and respect. He described the plight of mankind at the end of their tether, but introduced the art of drama into a new village with a bright future.
John banville, an Irish writer who won the Booker Prize in 2005, once said: Today's Irish writers are divided into two schools, either Joyce School or Beckett School. Joyce always tries to fill the world, while Beckett always leaves the world blank, waiting for people to think about what to do.
Harold pinter, a British writer, drama director and Nobel Prize in Literature winner in 2005, said: He doesn't lead me to any garden path, he doesn't wink at me secretly, he doesn't instill in me the cure, the way forward, the inspiration from heaven, and he doesn't give me a pot of bread crumbs. He won't sell me anything I don't want to buy. Whether I buy it or not, he won't talk nonsense to me. His hands are never higher than his heart. However, I am happy to buy his goods: whether it is a hook, a thread or a hammer, because he turned all the stones upside down without leaving any maggots. He gave birth to something beautiful.