Watt

Rating:
Summary: Roller-coaster existentialism, and fun, too!
Review: "Watt" is the hilarious story of an itinerant character who walks one day from a train station, like a homing pigeon, straight to the home of a man whom he will serve. He enters the kitchen to take his spot, whereupon the present kitchen worker issues a rambling monologue of stunning length and baffling content, then leaves the household for Watt to stay behind. In the first few pages, we are already asking: Why did Watt just show up? Whose house is this? Who is this man in the kitchen already? Why is he delivering this major dissertation? What does it all mean?

The rest of the book concerns Watt's service to the master of the house, some of it conventionally narrated, much of it digressive and odd. To explain this book, however, is to sound ridiculous. A certain number of things happen to Watt, he takes a certain number of actions, he engages in a certain number of conversations, and he ends the story in the book in a certain meaningful fashion. The entire story is told in Beckett's trademark effusive style, a rollicking, bizzare, but highly entertaining profusion.

The meaning of the book is also classic Beckett: Don't wait for Higher Meaning, because there is none. All his books portray absurd characters doing absurd things, waiting for life to reveal itself, but ultimately realizing that life reveals itself through the living. To answer the questions posed above, the book is compsed like a circle, just like life. At the same time, it's also completely meaningless, just like life. We go to some place, we stand in some position, we engage with some people, we commit some acts, we turn and commit other acts, and we engage with some other people. Somehow, among all this ballet, the world still turns, and we still live upon it. For all their foolish sounding, Beckett's books do indeed have a meaning, that life is just the living of it.

Beckett is a psychological master. His prose style will never be repeated. I'd call him the Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan of literature, a crude analogy, for which we should apologize, but it is one that we hope reflects the major impact of his work on the art, and his primacy among its literary practitioners.

Beckett's work is random by no means. It is carefully crafted, and has an internal rhythm all its own. If a reader is willing to take off their shoes and run through the squishy mud of Beckett's life-swamp, so to speak, it is a joy to read and great fun to reflect upon. "Watt" is a good example of his work, relatively short, and relatively simple, but still likely to provoke great consternation among any who are not used to Beckett's gushing and admirable style, but great enjoyment among those who take it on its own life-affirming terms.

Beckett is a great writer for those readers who seek a literary puzzle, a semantic challenge, and a story with a surreal whiff, which tells us how wonderful it is just to be alive, enjoying our time on earth. "Watt" is one of Beckett's more accessible and fun works.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Literature
Review: Disregard what has been written, in other reviews, about Watt...simply read it, simply continue to read it.

Beckett is always and essentially unreadable. But that does not mean we must not read him, that we must not continue to read him.

Watt is among his finest works.

Rating:
Summary: I dunno about the guy below me.
Review: I can't go along with this being one Beckett's more difficult novels, or for completists only, and not just because it's my personal all-time fave rave. From a biographical point of view, Watt marks the point where Beckett pretty much threw off the influence of Joyce, but before he self-consciously turned himself into the anti-Joyce. This brief state of affairs resulted in a fantastic, hilarious book that has everything - semi-vigorous ambulating, crack-up dialogue and rock-throwing action! This is Beckett's funniest work, and also contains some of his best discriptions and most memorable speeches (particularly Arsene's monologue), and is one of the easiest to read (allowing that Dream/More Pricks and Murphy are a tad insufferable, and thus a bit of a slog).

The impression that Wattis difficult may stem from the idea that there is some enlightenment within the text that the hapless reader is obliged to decode, deconstruct or otherwise deduce, but the book is more likely a dramatization, and an inflicting, of confusion. If this is found acceptable, the book is an intense pleasure to read and just maybe exceeds the Three Novels in this aspect.

Rating:
Summary: Watt Knott
Review: In his novels Beckett takes the baton from Shakespeare and with love and genius tells the next part of the human story. And among these novels Watt is the towering masterpiece. No writer since Shakespeare has so successfully contrived to be his characters yet let his characters live independent lives. In Watt Beckett chronicles the life of a hypersensitive man for whom even the most banal of events is charged with such colossal amounts of information that no sense can be made of them. Time and again the reader must weep with frustration and compassion at Watt's inability to ignore the trivia with which life abounds, and follow the poor wretch into another abyss of despair. Watt is more alone than any other character in literature; he repudiates any help, not that much is offered, and he struggles monumentally to unravel some meaning from the incomplete pictures that he is able to construct. He is so preoccupied with trying to saddle the events in his life with meaning that subsequent events act as a kind of avalanche, bringing him ever lower, physically and intellectually. In the end, Beckett may be saying that there is no limit to our ability to degrade ourselves, and that whatever hideousness we have contrived to date is a mere scratch on the surface of what is to come. A prohetic view, looking at the trends in the world today. One of the marks of Beckett as a writer/artist of the highest genius is that such an inference from his work is the sole responsibility of the reader, for many other views are possible and suggest themselves. But let us not dwell excessively on the deep and meaningful, because this work is also one of the funniest stories ever written, partly because of Beckett's unique linguistic genius, and partly because of his wicked powers of observation- example "He limped dreadfully- when under way he progressed rapidly by a series of aborted genuflections", and his powers of suggestion- "..in referring to Watt he employed an expression which we shall not record".
If you want to read some of the most beautifully constructed English ever written, be amused, be brought to the edge of the human abyss, and be changed forever, read Watt.

Rating:
Summary: Not what you think but how you think
Review: In this novel, and in others, Mr.Samuel Beckett has succeeded (where psychologists and neurologists and neurotics have failed) in illuminating the workings of his own mind and, in so doing, the minds of others (roughly speaking, roughly speaking). The glossy coverings of plot and character, of authority and certainty, have been unscrewed and tossed aside, leaving naked and exposed more primitive and ancient mechanisms (and seeing virtually anybody nude, in certain lights and from certain angles, can be very funny, and so it is here). What is more, the words unfix themselves from their accustomed roles, their unargued meanings, and so become free to associate amongst themselves. I don't know, I'm not sure how to encourage a hesitant reader to buy this book...a quote: 'But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such titbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds' eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouser-legs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.' Part III, paragraphs 15&16.

Rating:
Summary: Developing Narrative Perspective
Review: In¡®Watt' the third person narration Beckett uses shares an uncomfortable relationship to the characters of the story. It is based either on anonymity or antagonism. This is different from the common intimate relation that the narrators of fiction share with the characters they tell us about. The result of Beckett¡¯s writing technique is that the reader can get no sense of a total picture or a comprehensive truth of the character's reality. The narrator is just as curious and confused by the nature of reality in the fictional world as the characters. In the first half of ¡®Watt¡¯ the narrator shows an estrangement from Watt equal to that which Watt shows toward himself. This is not the unreliable narrator of traditional fiction, but a narrator whose ignorance is a cause of the technique of telling which seeks to provide a total viewpoint of reality. The narrator of ¡®Watt¡¯, rather than assuming the position of a narrator who is a guide through the tale, functions as an unnecessary intermediary between the characters and their search for an understanding of reality. Who else but Watt can effectively relate the experience of his being? Consider Lawrence Harvey¡¯s point in his essay on ¡®Watt, "He [Watt] becomes a storyteller, but one who by this time is so convinced of the inadequacy of ordinary language that he feels compelled to invent verbal structures that are more closely related to his experience.¡± Watt himself is dissatisfied with the way the narrator is telling the story in the first half of the novel and so tells in his own unique mode of expression his story to Sam who acts as an interpreter. This points to a growing dissatisfaction with language as a way of telling in the text and debunks the impossible power of the third person narrator.

Sam, who writes in the first person of his relationship with Watt, narrates the second half of the novel. Because Sam's subjective view isn't constrained by the obligations of the supposed all-knowing omniscient narrator, he can more effectively convey that the experience of being is unknowable and unnamable. He admits to the inefficiency of his communication with Watt because it is burdened by the hindrance of their environment and their physical inadequacy. A first person narration is limited by its partial point of view of reality, but it is this limited viewpoint that Beckett seems to be trying to convey. For all of Sam's studious attention and examination of Watt, we are left just as baffled as to who he is as the characters observing Watt at the beginning of the novel, but at least it is a view more conscious of its subjectivity than the omniscient narrator could provide. In the first half of the novel we were given descriptions of the fallibility of logic and in the second half we are given a direct account of the ways in which each solution obtained only generates multiple objections. The first person narrative¡¯s direct account thus points to a conscious subjectivity that deletes the assumptions made in omniscient narration that this view of reality is a true representation of what it actually is. However, it becomes apparent in the narrative that the fallibility of reason reveals itself to be not limited to a complication caused by the point of view in telling, but in the nature of the written language used to tell. He develops this point well in his subsequent fiction, but 'Watt' is a fascinating look at how these different narrative perspectives work and is a rich, comic novel to read.

Rating:
Summary: Wait, Watt, What? Beckett and the power of the human brain
Review: The irony of Watt is that the readers are looking for a meaning and Beckett is trying to tell the reader that there is no meaning, but telling this has a meaning. Sense you ask, has it passed me by? No, further you understand read the more make it will sense. The frustration with this masterpiece (gasp) felt by critics and students is an example of the trouble with trying to categorize the novel, which by the way, Beckett intends (I feel). He intends to reveal life cannot be categorized, or at least should not be and the search for meaning is frustrating, but not meaningless. Am I contradicting myself? Good. I believe Watt is immeasurably profound, but I will not go on about it, because I'm sure some/most (close 'em and point) of what I'm saying is just self-interpretation. But. Pay attention, however, to these ideas: Meaninglessness, Circularity, Diminishment, Existence of God (knott (not), dog, etc), the significance of Beckett's form, insertions (whoops) of sex, and the importance of ending the novel with the waiting-room. This is a dense novel that will make your brain hurt, so you must be prepared before you read it, but if you do, it will make you appreciate the beauty and power of the human brain.

Rating:
Summary: WATT: Haunting Echoes Receding Infinitely In All Directions
Review: There are so many aspects of this remarkable novel - one of the most important ever written - deserving exploration that it would be impossible to touch on them in this small space. So, I would like to focus on how this novel approaches the fundamental problematic challenge of narrative technique and person.
Before turning directly to WATT, let us note that a given in Beckett's work is that the conventional approaches to this challenge are simply too lacking in reality to be acceptable. The `goal' of Beckett's art is to find the point at which all the divergent elements that make up a literary work become one and this goal is reflective of and inseparable from the search to find the point at which all the divergent elements that make up a human being are one. In MURPHY this is called the "search to find home." For Beckett, art ( as he sees it ) is the closest thing known and available to an acceptable `religion', that is, a means of coming to some kind of meaningful terms with existence. But it is also a given in Beckett's work that this goal, both artistic and spiritual, is apparently impossible to attain. And yet it is the only thing worth seeking. This contradiction accounts for the tragicomic character of Beckett's work and Beckett's own mysterious and remarkable character accounts for the unique and profound pathos of his work. So, to WATT.
First of all, please note that the strangely beautiful, pedantic ( almost paranoid ) concern with exactitude and utter thoroughness in the narrative style resonates so deeply, almost perfectly, in relation to the character of Watt himself. It is impossible to imagine Watt presented to the reader in any other way. The narrative technique ( form ) coincides with the content of Watt's character and world with rare and astonishing precision and yet this narrative is the voice of another character in the novel called Sam ( ! ) whereas Watt himself never addresses the reader directly. There is both first and second person narrative utilized in the novel, but they are both apparently the voice of Sam. We, of course, immediately relate this name to the author himself and are tempted to see this as merely an example of an author having found a felicitous solution to the problem of balancing form and content, that is, of finding a narrative technique that resonates deeply with the content that makes up his central character. But Beckett himself rejects this as a solution, as an attainment of the sought point of union, and to see it this way is to miss a crucial aspect of the novel. The character Sam both is and is not the literal author of WATT. In fact, in a profound sense, Sam can no more be identified precisely with Beckett than can Watt himself, though they can both be imprecisely identified with Beckett. The subtle issue here is that the author's attempt to set himself as a foundation in the novel merely results in another mere character in the novel. Beckett could have chosen to not give the narrative voice personification in the form of Sam and just presented the narrative as the true voice of the author himself, but Beckett is too aware ( painfully aware ) that reality ( simply ignored by conventional novel writing ) is not so simple as that. So what we have is that the author, Beckett ( whoever that is ) creates Sam and Sam's narrative creates Watt and Watt creates the sense in us of tragicomic wonder and the haunting echoes recede infinitely in all directions. The point here being that the deep and remarkable perception on the part of Beckett concerning narrative technique and person reveals a reality that is somehow both more understood and therefore unified and yet more fragmented than ever.
I know of no figure who has moved further into the distance of the artistic frontier than Beckett. WATT is a crucial work of art that any lover of art must be familiar with.
And finally I would like to make an incidental note that the current Grove Press cover of Watt is very poor when compared, contrasted rather, with the cover of it's original 1959 issue of which I am very happy to still have a copy. Very small matter. Get this book.

Rating:
Summary: WATT: Haunting Echoes Receding Infinitely In All Directions
Review: There are so many aspects of this remarkable novel - one of the most important ever written - deserving exploration that it would be impossible to touch on them in this small space. So, I would like to focus on how this novel approaches the fundamental problematic challenge of narrative technique and person.
Before turning directly to WATT, let us note that a given in Beckett's work is that the conventional approaches to this challenge are simply too lacking in reality to be acceptable. The 'goal' of Beckett's art is to find the point at which all the divergent elements that make up a literary work become one and this goal is reflective of and inseparable from the search to find the point at which all the divergent elements that make up a human being are one. In MURPHY this is called the "search to find home." For Beckett, art ( as he sees it ) is the closest thing known and available to an acceptable 'religion', that is, a means of coming to some kind of meaningful terms with existence. But it is also a given in Beckett's work that this goal, both artistic and spiritual, is apparently impossible to attain. And yet it is the only thing worth seeking. This contradiction accounts for the tragicomic character of Beckett's work and Beckett's own mysterious and remarkable character accounts for the unique and profound pathos of his work. So, to WATT.
First of all, please note that the strangely beautiful, pedantic ( almost paranoid ) concern with exactitude and utter thoroughness in the narrative style resonates so deeply, almost perfectly, in relation to the character of Watt himself. It is impossible to imagine Watt presented to the reader in any other way. The narrative technique ( form ) coincides with the content of Watt's character and world with rare and astonishing precision and yet this narrative is the voice of another character in the novel called Sam ( ! ) whereas Watt himself never addresses the reader directly. There is both first and second person narrative utilized in the novel, but they are both apparently the voice of Sam. We, of course, immediately relate this name to the author himself and are tempted to see this as merely an example of an author having found a felicitous solution to the problem of balancing form and content, that is, of finding a narrative technique that resonates deeply with the content that makes up his central character. But Beckett himself rejects this as a solution, as an attainment of the sought point of union, and to see it this way is to miss a crucial aspect of the novel. The character Sam both is and is not the literal author of WATT. In fact, in a profound sense, Sam can no more be identified precisely with Beckett than can Watt himself, though they can both be imprecisely identified with Beckett. The subtle issue here is that the author's attempt to set himself as a foundation in the novel merely results in another mere character in the novel. Beckett could have chosen to not give the narrative voice personification in the form of Sam and just presented the narrative as the true voice of the author himself, but Beckett is too aware ( painfully aware ) that reality ( simply ignored by conventional novel writing ) is not so simple as that. So what we have is that the author, Beckett ( whoever that is ) creates Sam and Sam's narrative creates Watt and Watt creates the sense in us of tragicomic wonder and the haunting echoes recede infinitely in all directions. The point here being that the deep and remarkable perception on the part of Beckett concerning narrative technique and person reveals a reality that is somehow both more understood and therefore unified and yet more fragmented than ever.
I know of no figure who has moved further into the distance of the artistic frontier than Beckett. WATT is a crucial work of art that any lover of art must be familiar with.
And finally I would like to make an incidental note that the current Grove Press cover of Watt is very poor when compared, contrasted rather, with the cover of it's original 1959 issue of which I am very happy to still have a copy. Very small matter. Get this book.

Rating:
Summary: After a lifetime of reading, one of my five favorites
Review: This book is a joy! Beckett's wonderful English prose, his humanity and sense of humor, shine forth on every page. After forty years and many rereadings, it has only grown on me--the jokes still amuse, the writing is still glorious, the message is still enigmatic and profound. This is one of those seminal books that sustain and hearten you, that make you in love again with suffering humanity. There's no one like Beckett, and nothing (except the trilogy) like "Watt". Buy it. Verbum sat.