SOURCE: Hunter, Adrian. “Beckett and the Joycean Short Story.” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 2 (April 2001): 230-44.

In the following essay, Hunter determines the influence of Joyce's Dubliners on More Pricks than Kicks.

Reviewing More Pricks than Kicks in 1934, Edwin Muir identified a Beckett very much at home in Bloom's kitchen: ‘the toasting of a slice of bread, or the purchase and cooking of a lobster, can become matters of intellectual interest and importance to him’.¹ For Muir, the influence of Joyce was no cause for concern, though he was firm in his conclusion that, as yet, Beckett's work ‘[did] not nearly come up to’ the standard of the master. Other reviewers at the time were not so forgiving, blaming the waywardness, incontinence and ‘verbal aggravation’ of Beckett's prose on his obvious enthralment to ‘Mr. Joyce's latest work’ (i.e. ‘Work in Progress’), a book which for any young writer...