SOURCE: Cohn, Ruby. “Play and Player in the Plays of Samuel Beckett.” Yale French Studies 29 (spring-summer 1962): 43-8.

In the following essay, Cohn studies the layers of reality and unreality in Beckett's plays and discusses the characters' awareness of the symbiotic nature of these (un)realities.

Plato seems to be the first extant writer to view man as a puppet of the gods, and in his wake many authors have dubbed man an actor on the stage of the world. Since the metaphor was particularly dear to those beggar-philosophers, the Cynics, it is scarcely surprising that it also fascinates that contemporary creator of beggar-philosophers, Samuel Beckett. From variations on the old metaphor of theatrum mundi, where man the actor performs for an Eternal Spectator, Beckett creates a new semi-cynical drama.

In Beckett's first play, Eleuthéria (written 1947, but never produced or published) a man of letters, Henri Krap, closes...