Watt by Samuel Beckett

First published: 1953

Type of work: Absurdist symbolism

Time of work: The unspecified present

Locale: Ireland’s countryside

Principal Characters:

• Watt, the protagonist, who enters and leaves Mr. Knott’s employment
• Mr. Knott, the inscrutable, unknowable master of the house where servants come and go
• Sam, a madman who narrates Watt’s actions
• Arsene, the outgoing servant whom Watt replaces
• Erskine, and
• Arthur, who serve with Watt
• The Lynch family, who raise dogs that will eat the leftovers from Mr. Knott’s meals
• The Galls, father and son, who tune Mr. Knott’s piano
• Mr. Graves, the gardener with whom Watt sometimes converses

The Novel

Watt consists of four long chapters, followed by an appendix of addenda. It is virtually plotless as it traces Watt’s separation from a world of naturalistic reality, his arrival at the surreal world of Mr. Knott, his stay in Mr. Knott’s service for an indefinite period, his departure from Mr. Knott’s domain when his indirect replacement arrives, and his later residence in an insane asylum where he meets Sam, a fellow inmate, who narrates such events as occur in the novel.

This narration opens by introducing three minor characters, Mr. Hackett and Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, who are conversing in a public area somewhere in Ireland when they notice a tram disgorging what may be a carpet or roll of tarpaulin but turns out to be Watt, “wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord.” Watt moves on to a railway station from which he takes a train and then a foot journey to Mr. Knott’s house. On his way, he is abused by the train conductor and a porter, assailed by a zealous theologian, and hit by a stone thrown without provocation by a Lady McCann, who is “catholic and military.” One critic has characterized Watt’s journey to Mr. Knott’s house as reminiscent of Christ’s along the fourteen stations of the Cross.

In the kitchen of the Knott house, Watt is greeted by Arsene, the departing servant whom he is to replace in Mr. Knott’s service. Arsene delivers a digressive and pompous speech of more than twenty-five pages, warning Watt of the strange, deceptive Knott-world. In chapter 2, Watt is troubled by the potness or whatness of Mr. Knott’s pots as he investigates the elaborate arrangements for preparing Mr. Knott’s food (incongruous ingredients must be mixed together and boiled for four hours). He employs the many-membered, incestuous Lynch family to raise generations of dogs, keep them close to famine, and supply two of them daily to eat Mr. Knott’s leftovers. He also meets and is often puzzled by several other mainstays of the Knott household: the Galls, a blind father and son, who tune the piano; Mr. Graves, the gardener; Mrs. Gorman, the fishwoman, who calls every Thursday; and Erskine, who serves on the first floor while Watt supervises the kitchen below it.

Early in chapter 3, the reader is surprised to learn that the narrative perspective is not the author’s but that of Sam, an inmate of what must be a mental institution, in whom Watt has confided. The novel never specifies how much later, after Watt left Mr. Knott’s residence, he entered the asylum. Sam concentrates on his enormous difficulties in understanding Watt when they talked, since the latter chose to reverse the logical order of letters in words, words in sentences, and sentences in paragraphs. Consequently, concludes Sam, “I missed I suppose much I presume of great interest touching I suspect the second stage of the second or closing period of Watt’s stay in Mr. Knott’s house.”

In chapter 4, Sam describes what Watt has told him of his departure from Mr. Knott’s house upon the arrival of a new servant, Micks, who will replace Arthur on the ground floor, while Arthur is elevated to replace Watt, who was somehow promoted earlier to the upper floor. Watt leaves, as he came, in the summer. He must spend a night in the railway station’s waiting room, is hit the next morning by a bucket of slops, buys a ticket to “the further end” of the line, and is taken away by the train. How long do Watt’s actions take? The novel remains deliberately vague:

Watt was never to know how long he spent in Mr. Knott’s house, how long on the ground floor, how long on the first floor, how long altogether. All he could say was that it seemed a long time.

The Characters

The critic Raymond Federman has classified the novel’s characters into three groups. The first comprises those who are “human,” that is, ordinary, appearing only in the opening and closing episodes, concerned only with physical existence in the material world, and presented as stereotypes; they include railway and tram employees, a policeman, a porter, a journalist, and a gardener. The second group is made up of the “heroic” personages, who try to make sense of the Knott-world as they replace one another in Mr. Knott’s service: Arsene, Erskine, Arthur, the Lynches, the Galls, and Watt himself—“subheroes of the absurd,” says Federman. Finally, in the third group are found the “lunatics”; they have Sam as their sole spokesman. In none of these categories is Mr. Knott, who is unapproachable, unknowable, the master of his universe.

Watt’s character is shadowy and never sharply edged: the novel presents him as incongruous, indistinct, uncertain, unsuccessful, unfulfilled, and often ridiculous. His mind speculates fruitlessly as he sets out on his Quixotic enterprise to elucidate the nature of Mr. Knott’s establishment. He traverses the three worlds of Watt, going from the human to the heroic to the lunatic condition, thereby unifying the book’s fable as he creates an illusion of order in a tale doomed to disorder, since it is told by a mentally unstable narrator. Watt is unable to establish a relationship, however fragmentary, with Mr. Knott. He speaks only three or four times in the book, is confused about most of the events that befall him, listens continually to voices which usually bedevil him, and is reduced by the novel’s end to deranged passivity, with his mind evidently in a state of disintegration. As Watt enters Mr. Knott’s domain, he becomes a mental machine investigating the dark zone of the Knott-world, trying to understand logically a cosmos that repels all rational understanding. By the end of his service, however, Watt has given up any attempt to extract coherent sense from the chaos surrounding him. He resigns himself to his failure and sinks into insanity.

As for Mr. Knott—his appearance is invariably variable, his clothes unpredictable, his shape unmeasurable, his character unknowable, his essence unattainable, his reality unseizable, and his nature unutterable.

Critical Context

Watt is Samuel Beckett’s last work of fiction to be written first in English rather than in French. It succeeds a collection of ten short stories, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and the novel Murphy (1938). Beckett wrote it between 1942 and 1944, when he and his wife lived in the unoccupied zone of France, in the Rhone valley, after the Parisian resistance group to which they belonged was betrayed to the Gestapo. He wrote Watt in the evenings after working during the days as a farmer and woodcutter, passing himself off as a French peasant.

Watt is Beckett’s most Kafkaesque text, with significant parallels to Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), which he read in the original German. Like Franz Kafka, Beckett renders humanity’s most negative moods: impotence, impossibility, cruelty, destructiveness, emptiness, futility. Both The Castle and Watt are novels of cosmic irony and absurdity, stressing the protagonist’s vain efforts to lay successful siege to impenetrable, indifferent, ineffable, and authoritarian forces. The tone of Watt, however, is calmer and more resigned than The Castle’s self-tortured writhings: Watt does not feel guilty, and unlike Kafka’s K., he does not undergo any punishment; nor is Mr. Knott the oppressive source of terror that Klamm represents in The Castle. Moreover, Watt has many humorous episodes, such as the elaborate investigation of the Lynches’ genealogy, which connect the book with such skillful satires as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Essentially, however, the comparison of Watt to Kafka’s The Castle holds: both are hauntingly powerful, absurdist, and myth-laden works that testify to their creators’ belief in a universe of agonizing chance and disorder, where the individual is hopelessly isolated and unable to understand or communicate his most crucial experiences.

Bibliography

Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, 1962.

Federman, Raymond. Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction, 1965.

Fletcher, John. The Novels of Samuel Beckett, 1964.

Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973.