Most of Beckett's characters have, to put it mildly, come down in the world. From the heroic heights of freewheeling movement that some of them achieve on bicycles, they journey backwards down the evolutionary ladder to a reptilian crawling in mud, or even to the vegetable condition of Winnie in Happy Days…. Virtually all of the quotations Winnie uses come from literature that is concerned with confronting death or with despair at the limited amount of time we have on earth. Beckett knows how many writers have charted this territory before him. But Winnie tosses off these deeply troubled moments as though they were jingles…. Beckett chooses his quotations with great care and they are all more deeply relevant to Winnie's condition than she realizes. (pp. 205-06)

Beckett is not the kind of writer who could say with Eliot of his literary allusions "These fragments I have shored...