Notes from a Room

…enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals, never anything else any more, from this time forth, and in it, somewhere, perhaps, riveted, tiny, the prisoner, how can he be found, how false this space is, what falseness instantly … it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails, no, it’s something else, it’s an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me, you must accuse someone, a culprit is indispensable, it speaks of my sins, it speaks of my head, it says its mine…

— Beckett, The Unnamable

It only means that there will be a new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

— Beckett (via A Piece of Monologue)

To class Beckett himself as the simple incarnation of ‘despair’ is a drastic oversimplification. To begin with, the concept of ‘despair’ implies the existence of a related concept ‘hope,’ and ‘hope’ implies a certain predictable continuity in time—which continuity Beckett would seriously question. ‘Despair,’ with all its inherent moral overtones, is a term which is wholly inadequate to describe Beckett’s attitude towards the human condition; nor is this condition, in the most current sense of the definition, ‘absurd.’ It is literally and logically impossible. And in this central concept of ‘impossibility,’ his thought has most of its origins – as does also his art.

— Richard Coe (via A Piece of Monologue)