Watt was 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...

's second published novel in English, largely written on the run in the south of France during the Second World War and published by Maurice Girodias

Maurice Girodias

Maurice Girodias was the founder of the Olympia Press. At one time he was the owner of his father's Obelisk Press, and spent most of his productive years in Paris.-Early life:...

's Olympia Press

Olympia Press

Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane...

 in 1953. A French translation followed in 1968.

Content

Narrated in four parts, it describes Watt's journey to (and within) Mr Knott's house; here he becomes the reclusive owner's manservant, replacing Arsene, who delivers a long valedictory monologue at the end of section one. In section two Watt struggles to make sense of life at Mr Knott's house, experiencing deep anxiety at the visit of the piano tuning Galls, father and son, and a mysteriously language-resistant pot, among other incidents. In section three (narrated by one Sam) Watt is in confinement, his language garbled almost beyond recognition, while the narrative veers off on fantastical tangents such as the story of Ernest Louit's account to a committee of Beckett's old university, Trinity College, Dublin

Trinity College, Dublin

Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...

 of a research trip in the West of Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

. The shorter fourth section shows Watt arriving at the railway station from which, in the novel's skewed chronology, he sets out on a journey to the institution he has already reached in section three.

The novel concludes with a series of Addenda, whose incorporation into the text 'only fatigue and disgust' have prevented, but which should nevertheless be 'carefully studied'. These take the form of concepts and fragments apparently intended for the novel but not used.

Themes and context

The character of Ernest Louit is only one of many satirical digs at Ireland contained in the novel. Others include the recognisably south Dublin locale and respectable citizenry of the novel's opening, Dum Spiro, editor of the Catholic magazine Crux and a connoisseur of obscure theological conundra, and Beckett's exasperation at the ban on contraception in the Irish Free State (as previously remarked on in his 1935 essay 'Censorship in the Saorstat').

Watt is characterised by an almost hypnotic use of repetition, extreme deadpan philosophical humour, deliberately unidiomatic English such as Watt's 'facultative' tram stop, and visual exempla such as a frogs' chorus, a notated mixed choir, and heavy use of ellipsis

Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted. An ellipsis can also be used to indicate an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence...

 towards the end of the text. The novel's final words are 'no symbols where none intended'.

Beckett himself said it was written in Roussillon

Roussillon

Roussillon is one of the historical counties of the former Principality of Catalonia, corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrénées-Orientales...

 as "just an exercise" while waiting for the war to end. Described as "the white whale of Beckett studies, a mass of documentation that defies attempts to make sense of it," (S E Gontarski in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004), the manuscript was consulted by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

while visiting the University of Texas at Austin.

A corrected text, edited by C.J. Ackerley, was published by Faber and Faber in 2009, removing the many errors in all previous editions.