Samuel Beckett and the Contingency of Old Age

Abstract

This article explores the ‘best chance’ for aesthetic inspiration and experiment that old age—as an experience and a concept—might offer to Samuel Beckett. It considers the way in which the period of advanced old age might elude conventional narrative structures, and why Beckett might find this suggestive. Finally, it examines the tensions that emerge in Beckett’s writings between philosophical treatments of temporality and contingency in relation to finitude, and the lived experience of temporal phenomena at the end of life.