SOURCE: Vandervlist, Harry. “Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks.” In Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality, edited by Daniel Fischlin, pp. 145-56. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

In the following essay, Vandervlist identifies the repudiation of action as a unifying theme of the stories in More Pricks than Kicks.

Samuel Beckett's early stories may not appear, at first sight, to share the kind of negative strategies characteristic of the better-known prose works, dating from the trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Yet his 1934 collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, provides an early example of Beckett's fruitful use of an apparently perverse negative stance: More Pricks Than Kicks repudiates one of fiction's fundamental aspects, the presentation of action. Beckett's early protagonists aim not to act, yet fail to avoid action, and the texts themselves echo this failure, succumbing to something less...