Time Aporias In Beckett's Novels

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), in today's literary world, is first recognized as a playwright who established his fame through an absurdist play and went on to stir the theatre with avant-garde creations. Yet the renowned playwright made his debut as a novelist in his late twenties and was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature in view of his achievements not only in drama but also in novel writing. The majority of Beckett's novels were composed before or around the time when Waiting for Godot was being drafted. From Murphy in 1935 through Watt in early 1940s to the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in early 1950s, Beckett is training himself to be a mature novelist, combining in his novels the spectacular Irish setting, his own inspirational academic reading and a deplorable postwar Europe.This dissertation focuses on Beckett's treatment of the metaphysical topic of time in his novels. In this study, Beckett's attention to and understanding of the time concept are firstly examined, which are traced back to his academic essay Proust where is found his so called two time aporias, i.e. "the impossibility to grasp involuntary memory" and "the impossibility to represent the involuntary time experience". As the dissertation proceeds to examine the time themes in the five novels above mentioned, it is revealed that the development of the five novels hinges exactly upon Beckett's attempt at solving these two time aporias.The dissertation begins with the conception the two time aporias in Proust. It is found that Beckett's criticisms in the essay of the imaginative and fictitious voluntary time experience formed by habit and memory are deeply rooted in Schopenhauer's pessimism about a life ruled by Will as well as in Bergson's distinction between voluntary memory and involuntary memory. The aspiration to find a true time which is willless and involuntary gives rise to the two time aporias which are adopted in turn by Beckett to initiate his own novel writing.The second chapter deals with the time theme of Murphy. The novel is interpreted as a simplified version of Proust's story of Marcel, in which the time aporias are emphasized through the irreconcilable conflict between the two worlds the protagonist are placed into. It is observed that Beckett further recognizes the time aporias and their inscrutability in this novel. From Watt onward. Beckett continues to come up with answers to the two aporias.The third and fourth chapters examine how time is understood in Watt and Molloy. Beckett begins to reconsider the notion of "true time" in the two novels. The time concept in Watt is compared to the sequential motion that Aristotle conceives time to be. The novel thus is interpreted as a fable of the clock time mechanism, with the two servants acting as the two clock hands and the master of the house the center of the clock dial. Molloy is regarded as a quest for time in its original form. By virtue of Carl Jung's theory of the mother archetype, the quest for the mother in the novel is understood to be a retrospective journey to the Time Goddess/Mother. Though time is reinterpreted in these two novels, Beckett is deemed unable to provide in Watt a substratum, namely a reliable and sustaining house master, for the sequential clock time, or to give a clear portrait in Molloy of the mother archetype Jung presupposes for his own psychoanalysis. Thus the time aporias remain unsolved.In the fifth chapter, as the dissertation suggests, it is Heidegger and Levinas's meditation on time and death that enables time to be interpreted as a relationship between life and death in Malone Dies. Death is never real in the novel but works as the Other to measure time as the Same. The novel thus tells a story of how to understand time in the context of its possible disappearance. In this wise, time is no more unidirectional and logo-central, which helps draw out the final solution to the time aporias in The Unnamable. The sixth chapter regards the uncertain and undecidable narrative throughout the pages of The Unnamable as Beckett's recognition of the aporia itself as the final answer to the time aporias. Time is eventually interpreted as "the between" which is featured at the same time by 'can't go on' and 'must/will go on'. It is concluded that the solution to the time aporias is paradoxically that there is no solution to them. That is to say, the aporias are questioning awaiting no answer.In summary, the study suggests that Beckett is groping through novel writing in the darkness of time aporias for the light a new substantial yet inscrutable understanding of time may shed. He starts in Murphy with the time aporias conceived in Proust, and ends in The Unnamable with a solution to the aporias which takes the form of aporia itself. The novels studied are arranged in chronological order, which implies that the process of Beckett's novel writing is treated as a thematic development on the topic of time. All the quests in the novels are not separated from each other but work as a continuous journey to the final answer to the time aporias. the previous quest reviewed and rectified in the next to come. The time journey of Beckett from aporia to aporia is by no means a circular movement but an effort to reach the fact that it is the uncertain and undecidable part that is the true essence of life.