Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction

Given that the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was personally acquainted with the modernist master James Joyce, and even helped research and promote Finnegans Wake, it should come as no surprise that Beckett was greatly influenced by Joyce’s own work. However, much analysis of Beckett’s work tends to argue that he forged his own artistic identity in opposition to Joyce, seeking and eventually finding styles and methods unoccupied by his mentor. Beckett’s Dedalus is a comprehensive reassessment of this line of criticism and traces the nature and extent of Joyce’s influence in more complex, contestatory, and complementary ways throughout all of Beckett’s major fiction.

Paying close attention to the extensive network of allusions Beckett derived from Joyce’s writing, P.J. Murphy reveals how Beckett consistently echoed and engaged in dialogue with Joyce’s works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in particular, its protagonist Stephen Dedalus. This study proposes that the relationship between the two writers was a complex life-giving and art-building dialogue concerned with aesthetic theories, depictions of reality, and the artistic integrity needed to carry out these critical investigations.

Beckett’s Dedalus is a fascinating study of the literary influence one generation has on the next. It will change the way we consider the relationship between two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.