Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Narrator (Epigraph)

Importance: Samuel Beckett is the Red Doc>'s most notable influence, just as James Joyce was a major influence on Autobiography of Red. In fact, G’s progression from a hopeful young artist in Autobiography of Red to the embittered adult of Red Doc> mirrors the devolution of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. However, Carson does not provide a jovial Leopold Bloom figure to save the spirit of her book; Red Doc> is populated only by lost souls, various kinds of Stephens. This gradual shift from Joycean aspiration to Beckettian disintegration signals a sea change in Carson’s perspective, not only in relation to the world but also to the possibilities of representation as such. Some might argue that, after Joyce and Beckett, literature (especially fiction) has nowhere left to go. Joyce had pushed...