- Home (Essays upon S. Beckett's theatre)
- Beckett's theatre : the character as a philosopheme
- Did Samuel Beckett find the inspiration of Happy days in Un Carnet de bal by Julien Duvivier ?
- How and why Samuel Beckett deceived the critics of Waiting for Godot
- Samuel Beckett stripped bare by his authors, even
- Samuel Beckett's Endgame : against Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind
- The end of Art and the Advent of a money-governed world in Waiting for Godot
- "Life : a game that always gets lost." For Endgame, Samuel Beckett got the idea from the French critic Sainte-Beuve.
- Endgame: Beckett and Aristotle
- Evil in Beckett's theatre
- Master and disciple in Beckett's theatre
- Waiting for Godot: Beckett and Proust
- Wainting for Godot and The Temptation of Saint Antony (Flaubert)
- Beckett's Miscellanies
Gérard Piacentini : The character in Beckett's theater.
"Le référent philosophique comme caractère du personnage dans le théâtre de Samuel Beckett",
Revue d'histoire du théâtre, n°4, 1990, pp. 323-371
In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy days, each character embodies a philosophy : Vladimir embodies cartesianism, Estragon leibnitzism, Hamm aristotelism, Nagg and Willie epicurianism, Pozzo and Lucky stoicism and Winnie represents Berkeley's philosophy.
In Endgame, Hamm wants to die, but his servant, Clov, taking care of him, maintains him alive. Taken in by charity when a child, with no father, Clov is weak-hearted and temperamental. Clov has no character, no philosophy, and he is unable to quit Hamm. Hamm symbolically brings up Clov. Thanks to Hamm's education, Clov gains a character and is able to live his own life. He quits home and Hamm can die.
This feature is referenced in :
Murphy P. J., Werner Huber, Rolf Breuer and Konrad Schoell. Critique of Beckett Criticism: A Guide to Research in English, French, and German.
Literary Criticism in Perspective. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994, p. 85.
"The construction of character in Beckett's theatre is the theme of a recent article by Gérard Piacentini (1990).
Piacentini considers some of Beckett's characters as manifestations and incarnations of sorts of various philosophies.
Thus, Vladimir embodies the philosophy of Descartes, Estragon that of Leibniz, Pozzo, Lucky and Nell represent stoicism.
Hamm is an Aristotelian, Nagg and Willie are Epicureans, and Winnie stands for Berkeley's philosophy.
Piacentini shows quite convincingly how the characters develop and move between these different positions and the respective philosophemes."