SOURCE: Elam, Keir. “Dead Heads: Damnation-Narration in the ‘Dramaticules.’” In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, pp. 145-66. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Elam illustrates Beckett's repetitive use of aged, disembodied heads and faces in his later short plays to represent death, darkness, the afterlife, and Hell on Earth. Elam makes many comparisons between these short plays and Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.

E un ch'avea perduti ambo li orecchi per la freddura, pur col viso in giùe disse ‘Perché cotanto in noi ti specchi?’(1) 

Dante, Inferno, Canto xxxii

Beckett's ‘dramaticules’: the Dying and the Going

When, in 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Samuel Beckett to write him a play about death,² he would appear to have been guilty of a fortunate tautology. Fortunate, because the playwright's generous response to the request was the beautiful miniature A Piece of Monologue (1979), whose...