Worstward Ho

Beckett's second last prose text, Worstward Ho , is a novella written in 1983, shortly after the largely autobiographical Company and an ironic theological speculation, both previously published as the first two parts of a late trilogy of short novels. The concentration of language and precision of description in the current work is revolutionary, even for Beckett, the great reshaper of literary expression, and its theme is the creation of life, as if by a malignant God or Demiurge. Life, against all possibility, finally exists, and man becomes a painful presence. It is one of the supreme poetic texts of the 20th century. In "Worstward Ho",the reader is confronted with a kind of Cartesian duality: we listen to a mind lamenting the fact that the body it inhabits,in conspiracy with a world outside, inhabited purely by "shades", combine to separate it from God.