Samuel Beckett 散文作品の特徴と近世哲学的言説についての考察

The way that ideas are expressed in Samuel Beckett’s prose works is characteristic of a peculiar narrative style. The novel, The Unnamable, is particularly focused on the relation between human existence and words, evoking a fundamental motif of early-modern philosophy. This work, Beckett’s most representative prose work, addresses the extreme pursuit of the perception of one’s identity through language. It can be supposed that this obsessive pursuit is composed of a parody of the early-modern philosophical discourse of the 17th century when Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and others pondered human reason, understanding, intelligence, and ethics based on the logic of language. In the early-modern age, the validity of logocentric ideas was established through European philosophy, corresponding to its civilization and the spirits of its people.Although John Locke explained the function of language in detail, it was David Hume who developed atheistic skepticism. Hume denied causality in the phenomena of things, and placed importance on ‘perception’ and ‘probability’. These conceptions seemed to be inspired by the narration of The Unnamable. Beckett who presumably was suspicious of the certainty of logocentric ideas created a characteristic narrative through an eccentric style of monologue. While the narrator perceives his own existence in a soliloquy filled with words, he cannot recognize any things through language. Beckett probably aimed to create an ‘unnamable’ vortex with cynical humor, making a critical allusion to the essence of human existence