A Note on the Structure of Lucky's Speech

A NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE OF LUCKY'S SPEECH LUCKY'S TORRENT OF WORDS IN fVaiting for Godot is a carefully wrought poetic structure. It divides into three distinct parts. The first, which ends with the phrase "better than nothing," is the unfinished protasis of a theological or philosophical argument presented in the rationalistic geometrical mode of Descartes and Spinoza. Given the existence of God, then. ... Every word in this part, with the exception of the scholastic duck-quacks, is part of a coherent syntaxthe skeleton of which has been identified by Ruby Cohn. The second part, like the first, is an incomplete fragment of a rational argument. It is the last half of an objection-"But not so fast!" -to the unfinished demonstration in the first. It begins in its own middle, but comes to a full period stop. Thus its syntax, though coherent, is not, as Cohn seems to suggest, continuous with that of the first part. The grammatical outline of the second part is ... and considering, what is more, that, as a result of the labors left unfinished ... of Testew and Cunard, it is established ... that man, ... in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation , wastes and pines ... and ... in spite of the strides of physical culture ... fades away, ... the dead loss per head ... being to the tune of one inch-four ounce . . . stark naked ... in Connemara . Three subdivisions are discernible within this second part: 1) a selfrepeating verbal trap reminiscent of the dog-song in Act II, 2) an enumeration of activities taking place in cycles of time ("autumn, summer, winter") and place ("Feckham, Peckham, Fulham, Clapham "), and 3) a collection of contradictions and malapropisms. The third part begins as a second objection in parallel with the earlier one-"... and considering, what is more"-, but after a halfhearted try at the self-repeating trap, it discards all syntax and lapses into complete aphasia. Its phrases are of two kinds: 1) those with elements repeated from or referring to the previous parts, and 2) poetic words introduced for the first time. ANSELM ATKINS'" ...Anselm Atkins, working for his doctorate in "literature" and "theology" at Emory University has published articles on theology and criticism. 309 ...