Self-exploration In Dialogues

Self-exploration is an eternal theme in Beckett's works, represented in his novels, dramas and film. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Beckett wrote several plays for broadcast. In this period, Beckett's self-exploration theme shows an ingoing feature in the dialogues between different counterparts in his radio works. Through the analysis of his radio plays, one could find that the realms of his exploration switch from the relationship between individual and the world to the exploration in the history of oneself, and finally in the pure mind and the mind's disappearance into the text. In Beckett's own words, the process of art and exploration is like peeling an onion. Stripped of the illusions of self and the world, the ideal core of emptiness will appear, and that is death, silence and the most natural existence of being.In this thesis, Chapter One introduces the European literary background of 1950s to 1960s and the feature of the medium of radio in representing Beckett's self-exploration, as well as the main criticisms on Beckett's radio works; Chapter Two focuses on Beckett's first radio work, All That Fall, in which Sigmund Freud's theory of death and sex instinct is applied to analyze the confliction between the impulses of the inner world and the deserted and barren outer world; Chapter Three discusses Beckett's second radio play Embers and the relationship between the past and the present with Bergson's idea of time and memory. Chapter four analyzes the last two of Beckett's radio plays, Words and Music and Cascando, and the relationship between the author and the text represented in the two works. Chapter five then concludes Beckett's contribute in the theme of self-exploration the second half of the Twentieth Century. To sum up, in his works on radio, Beckett finally reached his ideal home of the self-exploration.