SOURCE: Kloss, Robert J. “The Turning Point at Last: Beckett's ‘First Love’ There is a Choice of Images.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 13, nos. 1-2 (March 1992): 21-33.

In the following essay, Kloss identifies four short stories—“The End,” “The Calmative,” “The Expelled,” and “First Love”—as the turning point in Beckett's artistic career and provides a close reading of “First Love” to gain insight into the images, themes, and characterizations that came to preoccupy Beckett.

In her biography of Samuel Beckett, Deirdre Bair vividly depicts a vision he had during one of his late-night, non-stop, drunken prowls that finished on the end of a Dublin jetty in the midst of a March snowstorm. Here, apparently in an epiphany, Beckett envisioned in an instant the direction his writing should take, the form it should have; he had come, in his own words, to “the turning point at last.” “All his...