In the end for Samuel Beckett, it all boiled down to a question of words, and the fewer the better. The pared-down prose of a late fable like Ill Seen Ill Said was in some ways a distillation of the whiskey-fuelled blarney that Beckett had absorbed as a student in his native Dublin in the mid-1920s. The tramps and other strays that crowded his literary imagination spoke like broken-down, bar-room virtuosos. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, stutters The Unnameable.For all the bleakness of his vision, comedy encroached often enough. He became a reluctant celebrity after the success of his play Waiting for Godot, absurdly billed in Miami in 1956 as “the laugh sensation of two continents”. The verdict was not far wrong. For Beckett at least, the