SOURCE: Ayers, Carolyn Jursa. “An Interpretive Dialogue: Beckett's ‘First Love’ and Bakhtin's Categories of Meaning.” Samuel Beckett Today 7 (1998): 391-405.

In the following essay, Ayers applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogue to “First Love.”

Discussing Beckett and Bakhtin together presents a challenge, to say the least; it seems remarkable that two men who led somewhat parallel lives could come to such diametrically opposed conceptions of man's place in the world. They were, after all, rough historical contemporaries (Bakhtin's dates are 1895-1975, Beckett's are 1906-1989), and lived through some of the same experiences of the twentieth century. Both survived in precarious conditions during the Second World War, and although neither was inclined toward political activity, both occasionally found themselves objects of political suspicion. Furthermore, they both endured painful and debilitating illness over the course of many years. Both men were highly educated, very much at home in the Western literary...