Dead Enough to Bury

Abstract

This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett’s trilogy, through focussing on representations of the act of burial, an act which draws attention to a caesura between biotic and abiotic conceptions of both life and afterlife. As the worlds of the trilogy become progressively less biotic, The Unnamable might be thought of as a laboratory in which the ‘lives’ of its characters are subjected to various biological experiments, experiments which suggest that narrative fiction, like the act of burial, is a kind of prophylactic against the fundamental processual nature of biotic life.