The Poetics of Silence: Self-Effacing Language in Beckett’s Short Works

This article examines Samuel Beckett’s short prose and late dramatic writing as a sustained experiment in self-effacing language, where silence functions not as a symbolic absence but as a structural and experiential condition of writing itself. Through close readings of The Unnamable and the short play What Where, the analysis shows how Beckett internalises the conflict between form and formlessness into the texture of the text, replacing character, plot, and psychological interiority with a persistent textual voice that speaks only in order to expose the insufficiency of speech. Drawing on early formalist criticism (Maurice Nadeau), Maurice Blanchot’s notion of literary disappearance, and Beckett’s own reflections on the misuse of language, the article proposes silence as a real, material, and corporeal presence rather than a purely negative or deferred one. While acknowledging the relevance of poststructuralist and Deleuzian frameworks, the article ultimately contends that Beckett resists theoretical capture through a deadpan seriousness in which “nothing” designates not the absence of meaning, but the insistence of silence as the condition of literary continuation.