Semester Award Granted
Spring 2025
Submission Date
May 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Julieanne Ulin
Abstract
This thesis draws on and extends previous Gnostic readings of Samuel Beckett’s fiction which has located the figure of the demiurge mostly in the background and finds through close reading that in Endgame the demiurge takes the foreground.
This thesis proposes that Endgame’s gnosticism goes further than recreating gnostic themes and tropes. Rather, Endgame’s gnosticism fuses the gnostic laughter of the gnostic Christ, Schopenhauerian tragedy, and Quietist paradoxes to create a system of progressive enlightenment which culminates in a revelation evidenced by a laugh that, in Beckett’s Watt, is called the mirthless laugh. This laugh, I propose, is the laugher’s recognition that they play both the demiurge and the trapped gnostic soul to themselves. The demiurge, then, is no longer just in the foreground and background. This gnosticism, I argue, is closer to Beckett’s artistic vision as it incorporates Schopenhauerian concepts of the tragic and the will-to-live.
Recommended Citation
Chapman, Andrew Dean, "THE QUIET GNOSTICISM OF SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 85.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_general/85