Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter by Kristin Morrison (review)

142 Book Reviews message) his realization that he hated his wife. I see that recognition occurring when Hickey suddenly realizes that both his love and his hatred for his wife, taken as exclusive of each other, are pipe dreams. Unable to accept the pipe dream of love any longer, he turned to the pipe dream of hate and murdered his wife. In short, his crime did result from insanity of a kind, the insanity which refuses to acknowledge the violent contradictions in man's nature. While Berlin and I differ on this point, I share his overall assessment of the play's Lear-like dimensions. The outrightpraise Berlin heaps on O'Neill is appropriate and necessary, especially as it applies to his last plays. It is time that the playwright's greatness be fully acknowledged in his own country, so that the deeper analysis of that greatness may commence. As Berlin notes, the many exceptions justifiably taken to O'Neill's lack of linguistic facility and his propensity for melodramatic tricks (in his earlier plays) cannot take away from the fact that O'Neill is the one American playwright to match in scope, intent, and achievement the giants of the past. Berlin correctly groups him with Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov - and suggests his genuine affinities with Sophocles and Euripides. He concludes: "Nietzsche warned, 'Gaze not too long into the abyss, or the abyss will gaze into you.' ... O'Neill gazed too long. That his dramatic art allows us to feel something of what he saw testifies to the challenge he set for himself and to his astonishing accomplishment" (p. 65). MICHAEL MANHEIM, UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO KRISTIN MORRISON. Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel BeckettandHarold Pinter. Chicago: University ofChicago Press 1983. Pp. viii, 228. $20. Kristin Morrison's subtitle delineates her subject. Storytelling permits Beckett's and Pinter's characters "to reveal deep and difficult thoughts and feelings while at the same time concealing them as fiction or at least distancing them as narration" (p. 3). Combining references to Waitingfor Godot and Endgame, her title indicates how stories are told: "mere suggestion ... in various sequences and allusions" and "fully developed stories presented in the play explicitly as story" (p. 13). As she says of All That Fall, narrative may take the form ofdeception, "the deliberate misleading ofone character by another and the blurring uncertainties of a character's attempts at self-deception" (p. 73). She also recognizes, as she says of The Homecoming, that a character may unwittingly betray his "true feelings and motivations at a particular moment in the play" (p. 178). The book contains numerous insights on both authors. Step by notable step, she explicates the continuing self-deception in Krapp's narratives. In Happy Days, Winnie's canter about her first and second balls, her first kiss, and a toolshed whose owner she cannot conceive are ironically apt for this woman who, buried to the waist, can only remember balls or tools of any sort and cannot conceive, and whose "sexuality ... has been extinguished" (p. 47). Morrison demonstrates the psychological aptness of Henry's resumption ofhis story (Embers): after having reflected on his father's suicide, the story may be an effort to escape from its memory or a disguised, therefore Book Reviews 143 acceptable, way of coping with it. She notes that Joey's rape story (The Homecoming) aims to establish his sexual prowess just after he has spent two hours with Ruth without going all the way, and that Deeley's story ofmeeting Kate at a movie house (Old Times) allows him "to voice anxiety while at the same time establishing himself with bravado" (p. 196). Unfortunately, the book does not consistently satisfy. In practice, "canters" is so carelessly defined as to be almost meaningless. Vladimir's exclamations "It's Godot! We're saved! Let's go and meet him!" may, as Morrison says, echo the Biblical "Behold, the bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him" (p. 22), but they are narrative only in the loosest sense ofthe term, as is his and Estragon's name-calling contest. True, when Lenny offers Ruth an aperitif (The Homecoming), the word...