Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s early stories may not appear, at first sight, to share the kind of negative strategies characteristic of the better-known prose works, dating from the trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Yet his 1934 collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, provides an early example of Beckett’s fruitful use of an apparently perverse negative stance: More Pricks Than Kicks repudiates one of fiction’s fundamental aspects, the presentation of action. Beckett’s early protagonists aim not to act, yet fail to avoid action, and the texts themselves echo this failure, succumbing to something less— but also more—than the simple negation of narration. An impulse to escape the necessity to “do something next” exists from the beginning of Beckett’s career and “evasive strategies” similar to those described in Beckett’s later prose1 are in fact at work in the 1934 collection, as I will show by way of a reading of the volume’s opening story, “Dante and the Lobster,” supplemented by brief references to other stories from the collection.