The Beckett Walk examines unmotivated walking. Professor Furlani argues that such walking provides not only a narrative structure but a governing trope for being in Samuel Beckett’s work. For all its debts to Dante, Burton, Bunyan, and Rousseau, the Beckettian gait is not a walk from question to answer, from complaint to cure, or from damnation to salvation—is not therapeutic at all but instead ontological: a pilgrim's gress.
Andre Furlani is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of a forthcoming book on Samuel Beckett and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After (Northwestern University Press, 2007).