"The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of estrangement, constitute the main business of the theatre; everything hangs on the story; it is the heart of the theatrical performance" (Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre). Thus it is observed that, in Beckett's ?Collected Shorter Plays', it seems that the newest convention for expressing psychological inwardness on stage appears to be the so-called technique of storytelling where the narrative suddenly becomes drama. This really marks a break with the former accepted theatrical convention for revealing a character's hidden thoughts: the soliloquy. A soliloquy is a device meant to stop the external action so that internal mind could be expressed. Storytelling is the art of portraying in words, images, and sounds, what has happened in real or imagined events. To Beckett, it represents the human effort to create order out of a random experience. A story can be presented through action, dialogue and narration. It is an interactive experience between a teller and a listener.
[...] Storytelling is an essential part of the Beckettian drama, in his Shorter Plays more than in any of his works. Beckett's storytellers, driven by a strong impetus, tell a story –that of their own life for most of them- in the hope to get away from their incapacity to grasp the meaning of their austere existence, and the very act of narration often leads to the eradication of their inner self. The impulses, aims and consequences of storytelling in Beckett's Shorter Plays are inextricably linked, echoing each other and mirroring a typical penchant of the human being. [...]
[...] In Play, as we have mentioned above, it seems that the three storytellers will have to repeat their tale again and again, as long as their inquisitive spotlight will force them to do so –hence the parallels between light and story on the one hand, and darkness and silence on the other hand. This notion of the eternity of story-telling is also noticeable in Footfalls. The repetition of the dialogue of the opening sequence between May and her mother –“Amy. (Pause) Yes, Mother. (Pause) Will you never have done?”- shows up the never-ending facet of storytelling. The fictional narrative told by May suddenly becomes the present reality, which will have a multitude of “sequels” as we may imagine. [...]
[...] An ultimate point in self-evasion is shown in Footfalls. As we have mentioned already, this evasion is more subtle than it can be in any other play. The fact that May turns to storytelling to narrate autobiographical events in the third person is revealing: in so doing, she manages to escape from her issues –namely, that of her presence in life on the one hand, and her inability to respond to that life and to any fellowship at all on the other hand. [...]
[...] What urges a narrator to tell his story? Indeed, this question is worth answering. As a first remark, it seems that in Beckett's plays, the impetus for eructating a story is close to that which forces a writer to write. In our first part, we saw that in Beckett's Shorter Plays, the tendency to minimise the self led to characters who could not speak –as in That Time- or who could not say “I” directly –as in Krapp's Last Tape, Not I or Footfalls. [...]
[...] It is up to the spotlight to decide whether there will be an eternity of retellings of the same story, as evoked at the very end of the play, the very last lines of it being the first lines of the man's version of the story –“we were not long together”. Hence, a possible explanation for the title –the spotlight plays over supposedly unreliable storytellers, themselves playing with the truth. Apart from this urgent “need for storytelling”, some of the Beckettian narrators, on the contrary, shall refuse to tell theirs. This is in a way what happens to Mouth in Not I. She must tell her story, and yet she cannot. It is a refusal rather than an actual inability, for she is clearly able to attempt communication. [...]
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