Beckett and the Animal: Writing from “No-Man’s-Land”

At a time when philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Alexandre Kojève relied on the animal in order to distinguish it from the higher functions of the human, Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel, Murphy, troubled that distinction with a vision of the human driven by its incommensurability with the world around it. This essay argues that Beckett’s novel develops a zone of proximity between humans and animals based on this incommensurability, one that prefigures the concerns of his later fiction and couples the act of writing to a desire and persistence that Murphy relates to animal life.