[From] his earliest prose Beckett gives himself a persona, a personal representative whom he can know and probe as cosa mentale, yet he presents him at first as engaged in the non-existent external world, and his resource must then be to show the connexion as grotesque, so that the character alternately attempts it and withdraws from it, in burlesque indecision: this is what we may call the Belacqua phase of Beckett.

More Pricks than Kicks (1934) is (as might be guessed from its obscene though unassuming title) marked and annulled by the author's frantic self-consciousness: in these short stories Beckett is never done with torturing the language, which constantly approximates to fine writing and is constantly brought back to the level of jest or parody. The persona here is Belacqua, a character taken straight from Canto IV of the Purgatorio, where Dante sees him as 'more idle than if...