Two-Part Invention: Voices from Augustine’s The Teacher and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Augustine’s The Teacher and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame both depict father-son conversations characterized by similarly strange and self-conscious uses of language. Each father offers his son linguistic guidance of an odd sort. However, the oddity of the offering is not without a point. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s reading of Endgame, I explain the theological and philosophical motivations for the educations. I suggest Confessions book 9 may illuminate Augustine’s notion of the interior teacher, and I show how the forgotten mothers who haunt Augustine’s and Beckett’s texts offer resources for a richer account of language than that ostensibly offered by the fathers.