Troubled voices from within: Four Beckett radio plays

Abstract

The four short radio plays that Beckett wrote in the early 1960s – Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Cascando and Words and Music – each present us, expressionistically, with a fictional mind whose enclosing skull is the radio itself. Each mind engages in introspection for the sake of understanding itself better, but finds that inner self-knowledge must remain frustratingly elusive. Beckett invokes the work of two philosophers, Mauthner and Schopenhauer, and two major novelists, Joyce and Proust, to show us why the minds feel compelled to be introspective, and why their efforts at self-discovery are inevitably doomed to failure.