title: Novels I of Samuel Beckett: Volume I of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
author: Samuel Beckett
description: Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime, its perpetrators to be punished by offering them infinite numbers of absurd logical conclusions. He loved the tension in 'cogito ergo sum' and took a dim view of the connecting word, the 'ergo' in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with whom they were trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am."
zlib_text: SAMUEL BECKETT: THE
  CRITICAL HERITAGE
  
  THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
  General Editor: B.C.Southam
  The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism
  on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary
  responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the
  formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a
  literary tradition.
  The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the
  history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little
  published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.
  Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in
  order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s
  death.
  
  SAMUEL BECKETT
  THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
  Edited by
  L.GRAVER AND R.FEDERMAN
  London and New York
  
  First published in 1979
  This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
  “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routl