| Volumous studies on Beckett's plays have been conducted in the past decades, from perspectives such as politics, philosophy, aesthetics, deconstructuralism, postmodernism, postconolism, feminism and reader reception, and so on. However, the study of metaphors in Beckett's plays, by and large, has been neglected. Accordingly, this dissertation studies metaphors by basing on Beckett's dramatic texts and analyzing them under multiple metaphorical theories from the cognitive perspective.This dissertation is written with a twofold intention. The first intent is to address some problems concerning the available theories of metaphors in general. The purpose is to argue that the meaning in Beckett's plays is created through metaphor. In traditional views, metaphor is defined as a figure of speech which means deviation from ordinary usage of language. In other words, there is a"mismatch"or a"deviance"in the verbal composition. As a result, the understanding of metaphor is primordially a matter of word displacement, or semantic anomaly which is related to cognition. In Beckett's plays, word displacement and semantic anomaly are very common. Correspondingly, the approach of research on Beckett's plays should shift the perspective from the level of words to the level of cognition.The second intent is to study metaphors in Samuel Beckett's dramatic texts by making use of some relevant cognitive theories such as emotion, time as space, image-schema and so on. As we know, Beckett's plays are nonconformist in the light of traditional theatre, such as original in form, theme and approach; multifarious in writing techniques featuring the wide use of comic, humor, ridicule, travesty, parody, irony, sarcasm and metaphor and so on and so forth. This dissertation suggests that metaphor is one of the most important features in Beckett's plays. Through this study, this dissertation intends to make it clear how Beckett applied metaphor theories to his dramatic writing, and what implications this dissertation will achieve.The dissertation concentrates on the study of verbal metaphors, covering emotion metaphors (Chapter Three), time as space metaphors (Chapter Four) and image-schema metaphors (Chapter Five), and non-verbal metaphors (Chapter Six), focusing upon musical metaphors and visual metaphors in Beckett's dramatic texts. This dissertation first explores emotion metaphors in Beckett's early famous pays: Waiting for Godot (1949) and Krapp's Last Tape (1957) by applying the emotive theory (Ortony et al. 1988, Kovecses 1990a, Way 1991) and metaphor as a speech act (Mac Mormac, 1990) to analyzing emotion metaphors in Beckett's dramatic texts, including emotions of happiness and intimacy as well as ambivalence in Waiting for Godot, and emotions of loneliness and sadness in Krapp's Last Tape. I suggest that emotion metaphors permeate Beckett's plays. It shows that the emotive theory is one of the most important metaphor theories and the study of human emotion is pivotal to our probe into human cognition.Secondly, this dissertation attempts to examine time as space metaphors in Beckett's Happy Days (1960) and Endgame (1957) by using related theories of time and space (Keshavmurti 1991, Alverson 1994, Lakoff 1990, 1993a, 1994, Lakoff & Johnson 1980) in Chapter Four. I suggest that Beckett's plays have provided the modern theatre the most abiding metaphors of time and space. The salient circularity of the dialogue in Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days as a whole is essentially an embodiment of this metaphorical phenomenon. Both the bare empty room in Endgame and wild unshrouded mound in Happy Days are the manifestations of time and space. After that, the study of"time"and"oblivion"in Waiting for Godot is followed by using the same theories of time and space metaphors.Thirdly, image-schema metaphors in Beckett's Endgame are given equal attention in Chapter Five. In the process of analysis, some relevant theories of the image-schemata (Bartlett 1932, Rumelhart 1977, Holmqvist 1993, Langacker 1987) are used. This chapter also fuses the schemata theory with metonymy because they operate in discourse under metonymic operations of PART FOR WHOLE and WHOLE FOR PART, CAUSE FOR EFFECT and EFFECT FOR CAUSE, and so on. It covers three aspects: 1) a game of chess: metonymic manifestation of the part-whole image-schema; 2) a room: metonymic manifestation of centre-periphery image-schema; 3) a journey: metonymic manifestation of the source-road-goal image-schema.Finally, non-verbal metaphors in Beckett's dramaticules are explored in Chapter Six, focusing on musical metaphors and visual metaphors. With the recent development in psychological investigations of metaphorization and figurative processes, many scholars argue that metaphor is not merely a kind of linguistic phenomenon. More attention has been paid to non-linguistic or non-verbal metaphors recently. This dissertation indicates that, on the one hand, non-verbal metaphors are very common in Beckett's later plays; on the other hand, such study is not only necessary but also innovative. First, this chapter focuses on the Musical Event Structure metaphors in Beckett's Ghost Trio from two aspects: dynamic qualities of music and intensity of musical experience. Then, it discusses the visual metaphors in Beckett's dramaticules from three aspects: 1) a fragmented mouth identity: visual metaphor in Not I; 2) Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived): visual metaphor in Film; 3) counterpoint and iconography: visual metaphor in Beckett's Play.In a word, this research studies metaphors in Beckett's dramatic texts by means of uniting current views of metaphors in cognitive theory with the practice of dramatic text interpretation. It is, no doubt, a cross-disciplinary and innovative research. Through this study, we find that most of the characters in Beckett's plays are all meaninglessly victims of powers stronger than themselves and beyond their control. Moreover, metaphoric reading of Beckett's dramatic texts makes us deepen our understanding of his outlook on life which is deterministic.
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