The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett

318 pp. "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."--from Molly." "From this sentence, Michael Robinson extracts the title of his brilliant and perceptive study of Samuel Beckett. Covering all of Beckett's extant work, with special attention given to the great prose trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, Robinson carefully traces Beckett's work not merely to justify a particular literary theory but rather to illuminate what he sees as the "poetics of failure" which runs so completely and informingly throughout the novels as well as the dramatic works."