Consciousness, Beckett and the (Un)Aware Being: Krapp’s and Winnie’s Wobbly Mindfulness Under the Lens of Phenomenology

Interrogating the influence of twentieth-century phenomenology on the literature of Samuel Beckett, this chapter aims to analyse from a phenomenological perspective Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961), and to investigate the (in)ability of the protagonists of the two plays, Krapp and Winnie, to position themselves in time and space, the existential coordinates on which the subject’s acts of self-narration and self-location in the world depend. As for Krapp’s Last Tape, I will explore Krapp’s self-consciousness in relation to his defective memory, whereas, in the case of Happy Days, I will focus on Winnie’s complex corporeality and on her consciousness of being-in-the-world as a vanishing body.