SOURCE: Harrington, John P. “Beckett, Joyce, and Irish Writing: The Example of Beckett's ‘Dubliners’ Story.” In Re: Joyce'n Beckett, edited by Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski, pp. 31-42. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Harrington investigates the influence of James Joyce on Beckett's short fiction, arguing that “A Case in a Thousand” is “the most apparent adoption in Beckett's early fiction of the style of Joyce's own early work.”

After his work had taken on characteristic form and after he had acquired the public stature usual on winning the Nobel Prize, Samuel Beckett described his younger self of the 1930s as “‘a very young writer with nothing to say and the itch to make’” (Harvey 273). The itch to make without anything much to say is, of course, no specifically Irish phenomenon, but it was a particularly acute and a particularly dismal predicament in Ireland in...