What Is ‘One’ in Beckett’s Company? and Is It ‘Alone’?

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Word Count: 6,444 Is One Ever Alone? (apropos Company) What is ‘one’ in Beckett’s Company? And is it ‘alone’? What is the impersonal figure of “one” in Beckett’s Company: the individual? That model of selfhood constituted by a history of experiences? Or a historical concept, passé to Beckettian forms of subjectivity? Company signals an end to the tradition of ‘the individual’, that oneness synthesising memory, imagination, voice, body and consciousness. There is no such united being in the fragmented parts of this text. Given that the personalised notion of the individual is intimately related to singularity and isolation, the state of being ‘alone’ is in question too. The word ‘alone’ is derived from the Old English phrase ‘eall āna’, literally ‘all one’. It is the state of being ‘entirely alone, solitary, single’ – it presupposes unity and uniqueness. It would seem that all we can call “one” in Beckett’s text is a divided subject: so the true ‘aloneness’ this essay will attempt to determine is the question of whether one subject can be deduced from the collection of pronominal subjects that navigate this text. Beckett radically reconfigures the concept of personal identity as social identity – which is hardly identity at all, but company. How and why Beckett’s stance on subjectivity? There is no self in this text because Beckett had long denied language the ability to express a subjectivity that pre-exists language: coupled with habouring a profound doubt that extra-linguistic subjectivity existed at all. His writing, from early on in his career, was to be: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. Problems of language have long been inextricably tied to questions surrounding selfhood – at least since

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