Samuel Beckett's Interest in Form: Structural Patterning in Play

Abstract

THE FORM EXPRESSES THE CONTENT in the work of Samuel Beckett - and it is precisely this fusion of content with form that he approved in the writing of Proust and Joyce. "It is the shape that matters," Beckett once said, expressing enthusiasm over the proportion of a sentence of St. Augustine's, a sentence he has echoed in Waiting/or Godot. At the end of his article on J oyce5 Beckett considers in some detail the patterning in Joyce and Dante, comparing Dante's conical view of purgatory with Joyce's spherical one. Since Play, the most perfectly patterned of Beckett's plays, also takes the purgatorial theme and makes use of both motifs, this comparison is of especial interest.

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