Beckett’s Wasted Breath

Abject breath, running over with its own refuse and yet refusing to stop breathing, forms a gasping undertone to Beckett’s oeuvre. To give a sense of the longevity and development of Beckettian respiration, this article examines passages across the range of his career, paying attention to several prose works – the short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (1934) and the novels Murphy (1938) and Molloy (1951/55) – and two brief plays: Breath (1969) and Not I (1972). While there is no simple development of Beckett’s writing on the breath, an ambiguous movement can be traced from an initial rejection of a conception of the breath as immaculate and easeful to a deeper exploration of breath as polluted and broken, and to a final, insistent association of respiration with rubbish, and life with death. If there is hope to be found in the Beckettian breath, it lies not on the page but in the breath-carried conversations of the rehearsal room, exemplified above all by his collaboration with Billie Whitelaw on Not I.