The Pretty Quietist Pater: Samuel Beckett's Molloy and the Aesthetics of Quietism

What is it about?

During the 1930s, Samuel Beckett sketched out an artistic vision rooted in 'quietism', a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and indifference. In this article, I show how this interest in quietism continued to inform Beckett's postwar writing by examining a quietist prayer recited by one of the main characters of his 1951 novel Molloy. I also show how Beckett drew his quietist aesthetic from his admiration for the novels of André Gide and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

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Why is it important?

Previous studies of Beckett's quietism have only looked at his work from the 1930s, and have not considered his postwar fiction. This article also reveals that Beckett copied the quietist prayer in Molloy from a seventeenth-century satire of Christian Quietism, the original mystical movement that gave rise to the term.