The Language Games in Samuel Beckett's Three Plays: Not I, That Time, Footfalls

• Main Authors: Chung, Ren Rong, 鍾任榮
• Other Authors: Tien, Wei Hsin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1993
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/45812820111861419287

碩士 === 文化大學 === 西洋文學學系 === 81 === This thesis aims to explore, from the angle of Jean- Francois Lyotard's narrative analysis in The Postmodern Condition, how the institution and all the formerly unquestioning rules make the artists devoid of action and thinking in Beckett's Not I, That Time, and Footfalls. The dramatic figures in the three plays, the outraged artists, suffer from their obsessive painful memories in which they have been oppressed with the institution and the allusions to the God-like eternity. In the three plays, Beckett employs the disembodied structure and fluid language to detach from a center (the institution), to affirm the institution to be simply an illusion of a coherent self, and to delegitimize (to remove the over-legitimation of) the God-like eternity and the institution. By virtue of the separate language games in constant storytelling, the artists in the three plays have arrived at consuming their painful memories, validated their existence, and confirmed a self recognition which is constantly transformed as time goes by. Beckett's aesthetic assertions in "Three Dialogues" share some traits of the language games in Not I, That Time and Footfalls. This thesis intends to rethink, according to Lyotard's remarks on art in The Postmodern Condition, about Beckett's aesthetic conception in "Three Dialogues" and its association with the three plays. The deconstruc- tion of the totality and the affirmation of the free plays of language games uphold the major premises this thesis acts on. The purpose of this discussion is to emphasize the artists' endless games of creative multiformity with language games in order to widen the artist's inventive space.