Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing

This article explores the viability of the tropes of trauma and mourning in Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing. Beckett's work decomposes the initial premise of trauma and mourning: the idea of the subject within history. Texts for Nothing places the narrator in a timeless space, a space beyond history. Mourning presupposes a subject within history, a subject able to contain his or her trauma within a narrative, historical, frame. Because Texts for Nothing offers itself as a dismantling of narrative, these thirteen texts function as a critique of mourning and as a critique of the very idea of trauma.