Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love

This study presents a comprehensive and original argument about the fundamental literary value and the underlying psychological meaning of Beckett's work. John Keller explores Beckett's work, not only for its importance on a personal, human level for many readers, but its place in elaborating the origins of human emotional life, and of creative fiction. He explores the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing, which he argues is primarily about love. Keller believes that Beckettian texts embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness founded on early experience with the mother. He suggests that Beckett's greatest achievement as an artist was to document a universal struggle that allows for the birth of mind, and to connect this struggle to the origin, and possibility of the creative act.