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Abstract. Is Samuel Beckett committed to nihilism? This essay explores the question in an interpretation of his late short story The Lost Ones, taking as reference point Nietzsche's conception of nihilism as a diagnosis of our modern age. I argue that, exceptionally, in this one story, Beckett does imagine, in the Nazi genocide, a situation of the most extreme nihilism. It is his way of keeping the Holocaust in remembrance. Bearing witness to evil is, for him, the inescapable responsibility of the storyteller. However, except for this story, Beckett's stories always bear prophetic traces and echoes of something hopeful, open to redemptive possibilities. Although Beckett is not "committed" to nihilism, in this story, as unique as the Holocaust itself, nothingness, the ultimate truth of nihilism, reigns. For here Beckett leaves us with nothing but images of a struggle with death.
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In 1966, Samuel Beckett wrote, and then abandoned, a short story to which he eventually gave the title Le dépeupleur. In 1970, he completed it to his satisfaction and it was published.1 Two years later, it was issued in an English translation prepared by Beckett himself, who gave it the very different title The Lost Ones. In this story, Beckett is, like Dante, inventing narrative images of a "realm" or "world" in which matters of the utmost existential and moral gravity are at stake.
Beckett is frequently interpreted as an existential nihilist-that is to say, someone who, in Nietzsche's definition, would claim that, with the "death of God," our moral ideals and values are without any grounding in an ultimate and absolute authority, and are in that sense reduced to nothing. In other words, nothing can sustain their value against the arguments for skepticism, relativism, and amoralism.
Far from being a nihilist in this sense, however, Beckett was always a writer whose storytelling was burdened by moral concerns. His prose fiction and works for the stage do not propose courses of decision and action; but with the most uncompromising honesty, they show us conditions of creaturely life, conditions we find it difficult to acknowledge and apprehend with the requisite courage and force of imagination. As The Lost Ones unquestionably exemplifies, his writings are a summons to vigilance, and to the moral lucidity of...