Samuel Beckett “Murphy”

The name of Samuel Beckett, one of the founders of the theater of the absurd, a prominent representative of modernism in European literature of the 20th century, is associated by many with his famous play “Waiting for Godot”, which has become literally the standard of absurdism. 10 years before her, while still a little-known young Irish writer, Beckett published the novel “Murphy” – a fresh, bright, original work, which already showed many features characteristic of the author’s work in the future.

The novel “Murphy” is worth reading for that wash of absurd notes, subtle irony that softens the tragedy of what is happening, and the timeless story about a “little man” defenseless against a huge aggressive world.

Samuel Beckett: the beginning of the creative path
Born in 1906 in Dublin. On the paternal side, the Beckett family descended from those French Protestant families that fled to Ireland from the Counter-Reformation in France in the 17th century. The family was wealthy, the Beckett children received a good primary education, then studied at a prestigious Dublin school, among whose graduates there were many students of Trinity College. Samuel has shown a penchant for the humanities and sports since high school.

In 1923 he entered Trinity College to study English and European literature and languages. Beckett’s student years saw the heyday of Irish drama and the young writer often visited Dublin theatres. During his later years he traveled extensively and lived for some time in France.

Beckett’s first serious literary experiments date back to the late 1920s and early 1930s.Beckett’s first major work was Dreams of Women, Beautiful and So-So, but he himself later called it immature and the language too heavy. The first steps of the writer in literature were not easy – no one agreed to publish “Dreams”, they saw the light only after the death of the author as part of a collected works.

Written in 1938 when Beckett was 32, inspired by life in London, Murphy marks a break with the first, overburdened and slightly too baroque texts. Before and during his work on Murphy, Beckett became interested in psychoanalysis – he took the course himself and read the main works of Freud, Jung and other famous specialists of his time. This allowed him to shift the focus towards the inner world of the hero.

Poti immediately after the publication of “Murphy” Samuel Beckett went to France for a long time, so this novel also marked the transition in the author’s work from English to French. Later, he would regularly come to Ireland to see his family, but it was in France that his true talent would be revealed, which, after the war, would become the heart of advanced and experimental movements in art. Beckett will even spend World War II in France – from the first days of the war, he volunteered for the army, and when the French government capitulated, he went into the resistance movement.

“Murphy” plot
The main character is a young Irishman in London. He is internally unprepared neither for the rhythm of the big city, nor for the pressure that the reality of the 1930s exerts even on such a “little man” as he is.Not fully knowing what his individuality actually is, Murphy tries in a panic to protect it from a big city that threatens to grind him into powder, like thousands of people before and in the future.
What does the hero do to remain himself? He prefers to do almost nothing – this is his inept intuitive protest. If it were possible, he seems to have swayed in a chair in his room for days on end – during this kind of meditation, Murphy felt peace.

In order to pay rent and buy food, he takes a job. Without a profession and connections, he manages to find a very unattractive, according to the majority, position of a nurse in a clinic-sanatorium for the mentally ill. Surprisingly, this is where Murphy’s true talent is revealed – he gets along surprisingly well with patients.