three. There are three fully articulated attempts to light the lamp, three images of the advancing spectre of death, and three denials—‘No such thing as none’; ‘No such thing as no light’; ‘No such thing as whole’. And there are the multiples of six: six references to loved ones, six descriptions of the pictures which once adorned the now blank wall the speaker faces, six steps in the ritual” and six uses of the word ‘birth’, three included in the expression – or a slight variation of the opening line: “Birth was the death of him.” “The isolated man in A Piece of Monologue … has ruthlessly cut himself off from his past, ‘exorcising’ his ‘so-called’ loved ones by removing their photographs, tearing them up and scattering them … In seeking ‘less to die’, in deliberate acts of emotional desiccation, he attempts to abjure the memories of himself in former relationships. As he destroys the photographs that reduce his once-loved mother and father to grey voids, and him to another, he tries to obliterate the memories that connect him with life and intimacy. Nothing remains but dim recollection and an anticipated funeral to mark the end of his slow death mark from birth to oblivion”… Hovering as Old Father Time in his shroud, he is ‘waiting on the rip word’ … to avaunt his ‘so-called loved ones’ and his ‘ghastly grinning’ self. Kristin Morrison argues, "The rip word in A Piece of Monologue is `begone', that word by which the speaker dismisses from his life that which he has always really wanted.” Linda Ben-Zvi considers the word as "the pun on R.I.P., requiescat in pace (rest in peace), which suggests that death is the final way of ripping the dark." The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (p 365) proposes that ‘love’ is the “rip word” because his ripping the photographs of his “loved ones” from the wall “fails to bring about the consummation desired.” This demonstrates the multiple possibilities of interpretation that make Beckett so richly challenging to anyone attempting to reach fixed conclusions regarding specific meanings. Beckett effectively attempts to achieve on stage what he has previously achieved in fiction: to allow the two parts of the self to exist simultaneously. There is Speaker framed on stage who does not move (effectively a Tableau Vivant) – he resembles a photograph – and then there is the man in his