With the publication of Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett seems once again to have escorted us to one of the limits of what can be done with fictional narrative. Readers who have been following the development of his late work are in for a surprise similar to the one which greeted the first readers of How It Is 20 years ago.

The content of this new work is a further reduction of the basic situation Beckett has been exploring with increasing compression and economy since his early trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, first written in French during the 1940s. A mind, trapped in a deteriorating or immobilized body, sustains its existence by various forms of mental activity: perceiving, reminiscing, mathematical reckoning, inventing stories….

How It Is, which appeared in French in 1961, inaugurated a new sequence of narratives which now seems to culminate in Worstward Ho. Like...