Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
16. Uluslararası IDEA Konferansı, Nevşehir, Türkiye, 24 - 27 Nisan 2024, ss.67
The Agony of Ageing: Samuel Beckett’s Not I
Although the developing field of age studies is still an under-explored branch of literary and
cultural studies, Samuel Beckett is one of the few writers who attracted considerable attention
from the scholars of the field with the non-negligible richness of representations of ageing in his
work. In his novels and plays, ageing bodies take the central stage of the narratives as the leading
characters. In his short plays such as Breath and Not I Beckett manages to present thorough
representations of ageing without even presenting ageing bodies, although ageing is mostly
regarded as a visual phenomenon, or at least deeply connected to the body. This paper will
particularly focus on Beckett’s Not I and discuss how the fragmentation of narrative and the
fragmentation of character in the play are directly connected to the agony of ageing, which
results from the conflicting and confusing perceptions of temporal, cultural, religious, and
gendered representations of ageing. The character is torn apart by the discrepancies between
cultural narratives of ageing and her own subjective perception, between her biological age and
the age she feels in, and between the voice she gained with old age and her muted past. Also, the
narrative unity of the play is challenged by the fragmentation of human consciousness in old age
and the defiance of linear narrative expectations with reminiscence. In that sense, the agony of
ageing contributes immensely to the major theme of the play, the estrangement with the self,
which is suggested in the title Not I.
Keywords: Age studies, the narrative of decline, cultural perceptions of ageing, modernist
fragmentation, fragmented identity