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Dramatically, Beckett is more important for his focus than his range. He has forcefully reminded the modern theater that the proper study of the stage is man and the dilemma of his humanity. His spareness has been a valuable lesson in economy. But his use of the internal monologue is not ideally suited to the stage. In his trilogy of richly introspective novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Beckett roams inside a character's skull as if it were a continent. Onstage, the monologue is cramping, and the most dramatic skull is always likely to be Yorick's.
Priestly Vocation. Though he has spent most of his life in Paris, Beckett is Irish and the lilt of the Gael runs poetically through even his laconic prose. The brooding sense of grievance, the delight in wordplay, the spellbinding gifts of the barroom raconteur: all these Irish traits are in Beckett. With Joyce, he shares an inordinate relish for puns and scatology, and a tendency to regard sex as either a joke or a sin. Like Joyce, he regards writing as a priestly vocation. Few men have invested the role of a man of letters with more dignity.
If Beckett's art is deep, it is also narrow. The world outside his mind does not exist. The sense of place and society that saturates Joyce is missing in Beckett. Nor does he display Kafka's piety before systems and forces outside himself which may bring him to judgment. Poet Stephen Spender speaks of Beckett's "contempt for everyone and everything outside groping self-awareness." In a way, that is precisely his appeal to the contemporary personality, which is almost neurotically self-concerned and incessantly practices auto-analysis. It must be said for Beckett that his self-analysis has been honest and punishing. The concluding words of The Unnamable might comprise an epigraph in courage that knits him to his task and to buffeted and bewildered men everywhere: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."