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The Quiet Gnosticism Of Samuel Beckett’S Endgame, Andrew Dean Chapman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This thesis draws on and extends previous Gnostic readings of Samuel Beckett’s fiction which has located the figure of the demiurge mostly in the background and finds through close reading that in Endgame the demiurge takes the foreground.

This thesis proposes that Endgame’s gnosticism goes further than recreating gnostic themes and tropes. Rather, Endgame’s gnosticism fuses the gnostic laughter of the gnostic Christ, Schopenhauerian tragedy, and Quietist paradoxes to create a system of progressive enlightenment which culminates in a revelation evidenced by a laugh that, in Beckett’s Watt, is called the mirthless laugh. This laugh, I propose, is the laugher’s …