Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories ("The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End", all written in 1946) and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing"(1950-1952). All of these works are collected in the Grove Press

Grove Press

Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...

 edition of Beckett's complete short prose

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 (Beckett)

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 is a collection which includes all of Samuel Beckett's works written in prose, with the exception of his novels, novellas, and More Pricks Than Kicks which is considered "as much a novel as a collection of stories". The book was edited by S. E. Gontarski and...

.

The stories

All three stories deal with the displacement or expulsion of old men who are forced to leave their modest lives in search of a new niche where they might fit.

"The Expelled"

Though the story deals with rejection and the forcible ejection of the narrator, it begins with the narrator's complaints regarding the difficulty of counting the stairs down which he had to go once he was expelled. The story follows the narrator as he tries to find a new place for himself, all the while presenting his bitterness and anger towards many things in the world. The resentment in the story is not directed at the injustices of being thrown out of what we assume is the narrator's home, but of the more general injustices of life, such as being born at all, for which the only consolation the narrator finds is in distractions like mathematics.

"Texts for Nothing"

None of the thirteen "Texts for Nothing" were given titles; they present a variety of voices thrust into the unknown. According to S. E. Gontarski

S. E. Gontarski

Stan E. Gontarski specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory, and is a leading scholar of the work of Samuel Beckett. He is presently Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and edits...

: "What one is left with after the Texts for Nothing is 'nothing,' incorporeal consciousness perhaps, into which Beckett plunged afresh in English in the early 1950's to produce a tale rich in imagery but short on external coherence." Thus these texts, when compared to the three earlier stories, as well as First Love

First Love (short story)

"First Love" is a short story by Samuel Beckett, written in 1946 and first published in 1973.The narrator tells of his discovery by a prostitute on a park bench , and the cruel, even revolting, sexual relationship that develops out of this.A stage version was performed by Ralph Fiennes at the...

, may be interpreted as representing a movement in Beckett's writing from Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 to Post-Modernism. Unlike the earlier stories, these pieces are no longer completed stories but shards - "aperçus of a continuous unfolding narrative, glimpses at a never to be complete being (Narrative)." This idea is voiced in text 4, where the narrator admits stories are not required any more:

There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.