“Dubliners” is a collection of fifteen short stories written by James Joyce in which the author analyses the failure of self-realisation of inhabitants of Dublin in biographical and in psychological ways. The novel was originally turned down by publishers because they considered it immoral for its portrait of the Irish city. Joyce treats in “Dubliners” the paralysis of will in four stages: childhood, youth, maturity and public life. The paralysis of will is the courage and self-knowledge that leads ordinary men and women to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. In “Dubliners” the style is both realistic - to the degree of perfectly recreating characters and idioms of contemporary Dublin - and symbolic – giving the common object unforeseen depth and a new meaning in order to show a new view of reality. Joyce defines this effect “epiphany” which indicates that moment when a simple fact suddenly explodes with meaning and makes a person realise his / her condi...
After graduating from Trinity College, he was appointed English lecturer at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris and, consequently, moved to Paris.
There he came into contact with the French and foreign avant-garde intellectuals and artists of the 1930s such as James Joyce.
He joined the French Resistance during World War II and, in order to escape the Gestapo Police, he worked undercover as a farm labourer in the Avignon area.
He worked as translator and wrote some novels like the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.
These works were written in French and translated in English by Beckett due to achieve greater discipline and economy of expression, as dictated by his main goal: an attempt to explore and describe the human condition.
He became famous thanks to his major play Waiting for Godot and spent the rest of his life writing pays, some for the cinema, radio and television until his death in 1989.
In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Beckett is considered the father of theatre of the Absurd because his plays always deal with confinement, the inability to communicate and loneliss.
In Endgame (1957), for example, the protagonist Hamm and his parents are legless and their servant is only a man who can walk.
In Krapp’s last tape (1958) an old man listens to a tape recorded when he was younger, and maybe happier. The confessions of the voice on the tape seem to his those of a total stranger.
Finally, Happy days (1961), a play with only two characters, describes the human impotence and its negation: a woman is buried to the waist in Act I and, then, to the neck in Act II, and a man can only crawl on all fours.
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