His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett’s men and women.

She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all. It is not.