SOURCE: Campbell, Julie. “‘Echo's Bones’ and Beckett's Disembodied Voices.” Samuel Beckett Today 11 (2001): 454-60.

In the following essay, Campbell situates Beckett's unpublished story “Echo's Bone's” within his earlier and later texts.

The dead die hard, trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them. They are free among the dead by all means, then their troubles are over, their natural troubles. But the debt of nature, that scandalous post-obit on one's own estate, can no more be discharged by the mere fact of kicking the bucket than descent can be made into the same stream twice. This is a true saying.

These are the first lines of “Echo's Bones”, an unpublished short story, which was...