A Critical Literary Review of Devised for the Sake of Company by Samuel Beckett

“Imagine.” The echo resounds in the silence of the barren literary landscape, in the somber, halting, tenebrous confine of the mind of the one who is on his back in the dark. Beckett challenges the intellect to disregard literary norms and follow his neurotic succession of changing voices, ambiguous others and scattered memories. By way of concise repetition and the layering of various undefined recollections, Beckett traces the vague silhouette of a narrative biography which is at once both intimate and sublimely foreign. 

Beckett’s Company breaks from the traditional form of the novel, replacing chronological sequence with disordered flashbacks and engaging the author directly with both the protagonist and the reader. The author interjects from time to time between the mysterious voice and the various memories, giving the novel a stinging cohesion that allows recollection to engage with the literary present, and the literary present to be engaged by the author. However nontraditional and repetitive the form may be, Company is anything but devoid of meaning. On the contrary, Beckett weds form and function, and by the disjunctive repetition, draws out a profound commentary regarding the relationship between imagination, creation, and memory. 

The repetition of certain words and phrases pulse in an almost musical cadence and establish a dark backdrop upon which the author, the voice, and the protagonist imagine and are imagined, create and are created. The measuring, calculating voice of the author—the third person voice—is the center of creation in the novel, molding and repositioning the man on his back in the dark through a number of reoccurring ruminations on his present condition. While the man on his back sketches his autobiography through various shards of memory, the author occupies himself with different ways to imagine him and thus create him. “Can he move? Does he move? Should he move?