Introduction

When Samuel Beckett first came to international priminence with the success of En Attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, what struck many critics was the sense that his works were virtually divorced from any recognisable context. Yet while those struck by the apparent liberation from context in Beckett's works were correct in pointing to a strategy of negation in those works, they contributed to a critical tendency to overstate this freedom from context. This critical overstatement in turn led to misrepresentations and misunderstandings of the works. Yet the assumption that Beckett definitely broke with contexts has come to be challenged by many critics who have brought to light images, allusions and motifs that cause Beckett's works to resonate with the real people, places and problems that marked his life and the world in which he moved.