A Critical Literary Review of Devised for the Sake of Company by Samuel Beckett

“Imagine.” The echo resounds in the silence of the barren literary landscape, in the somber, halting, tenebrous confine of the mind of the one who is on his back in the dark. Beckett challenges the intellect to disregard literary norms and follow his neurotic succession of changing voices, ambiguous others and scattered memories. By way of concise repetition and the layering of various undefined recollections, Beckett traces the vague silhouette of a narrative biography which is at once both intimate and sublimely foreign.

Beckett’s Company breaks from the traditional form of the novel, replacing chronological sequence with disordered flashbacks and engaging the author directly with both the protagonist and the reader. The author interjects from time to time between the mysterious voice and the various memories, giving the novel a stinging cohesion that allows recollection to engage with the literary present, and the literary present to be engaged by the author. However nontraditional and repetitive the form may be, Company is anything but devoid of meaning. On the contrary, Beckett weds form and function, and by the disjunctive repetition, draws out a profound commentary regarding the relationship between imagination, creation, and memory.

The repetition of certain words and phrases pulse in an almost musical cadence and establish a dark backdrop upon which the author, the voice, and the protagonist imagine and are imagined, create and are created. The measuring, calculating voice of the author-the third person voice-is the center of creation in the novel, molding and repositioning the man on his back in the dark through a number of reoccurring ruminations on his present condition. While the man on his back sketches his autobiography through various shards of memory, the author occupies himself with different ways to imagine him and thus create him. “Can he move? Does he move? Should he move?

What a help that would be. When the voice fails. Some movement however small” (13). The author unceasingly busies himself with the movement and action of this one on his back in the midst of those shards of memory, creating what might be considered a musical pause between bursts of creation. Beckett utilizes this author, this third person voice to draw the reader back to another realm; the dark center in which the author is engaged with the reader in a discourse on the purpose of constructing company. He signifies this with the constant joyful revelation: “what an addition to company that would be!” (14). It also becomes clear at a certain point that the third person voice is not the only imaginative personality, but that the one on his back in the dark also is devising, distorting, imagining his past. In these moments of recollection and creation, a specific and pervasive sentiment is repeated with gray and rhythmic overtones.

While the one on his back in the dark engages imaginatively with his past, that vague country is decidedly “faint” and always carrying “the same flat tone” (23, 13). Beckett masterfully utilizes the repetition of these words and variants thereof in order to achieve the mystical, ephemeral landscape in which his protagonist can lie utterly alone with his memory. “A faint voice at loudest. It slowly ebbs till almost out of hearing” (11). The fantastic musicality of voice, ebbing and flowing in and out of the one on his back’s consciousness Beckett also reveals in the entire structure of the work. As the voice fades in and faints out, so does the author’s voice. The author’s voice flows in, “same flat tone as originally imagined and same repetitiousness. No improving those. But less mobility. But less variety of faintness” (24). Not only is the faint feeling felt by the author, it is even imagined and created by him: he is somehow in control of this world through his imagining.

Now that we are sufficiently lost in Beckett’s endless whirlpool of the “unword,” (his own coined word for his meaningless repetition), we find our way into the autobiographical sketch, the content that is hidden somewhere between the author, the man on his back in the dark, and we the readers. The manner in which the memories crawl in and out of the repetitive commentary by the third person author is a reflection of the crawling and falling movements of the man on his back to whom the memories belong. The disordered fragments of memory range from conception to old age, passionate erotic love to death and depression, from tender recollections to cold memories of a father. The sad and clouded beauty of this strain of thought in the novel is the memories that glow bright and fade grey and ultimately, in the end, leave the author, protagonist, and reader utterly “as you always were. Alone” (46).

The slow and calculating repetition in the end leaves us with a brilliantly crafted collage of intertwining scraps of memory, imagined reality, and the creative process. While the form leaves us spinning a tangled web, the meaning surfaces from the glimmering silk of its craft and pulsing cadence of its memory to invite us to imagine, to create, to hear the faint and “unformulable gropings of the mind” (16). Perhaps also we will be taught by the first and last word of the novel; that is, that we begin with the call to “imagine” and we end up entirely “alone” (3, 46). The repetition ultimately brings us to this end through its back-and-forth, free-flowing consciousness that means to confuse us, bewilder us and perhaps allow us to hear the “voice that comes to one in the dark” and imagine.