'The rapture of vertigo': Beckett's turning-point

A creative turning point for Samuel Beckett in summer 1945 resulted in his commitment to an 'art of failure.' Ranging across Beckett's post-war writing, this study identifies the theme of self-abandonment and investigates its connection with that aesthetic. Recurrent images of falling and drifting are linked by analysis with the familiar Beckettian motif of the birth-into-death. Beckett's immediate post-war decision to write in French is proposed as another form of self-abandonment and the project of the art of failure is seen, with reference to Schopenhauer's conception of the Sublime, as a repeated attempt at self-birth in a (paradoxical) moment of simultaneous wholeness and annihilation.