How It Is is a novel by Samuel Beckett published in 1964. It consists of a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through apparently endless mud, and reminisces on his life. The mud appears to be a kind of purgatory.
The title is Beckett's translation of the original French, Comment c'est, a pun on commencer or 'to begin'.
The theme may be the struggle of form to emerge from formlessness using Leopardi's sense of the world as mud ('E fango è il m...
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How It Is is a novel by Samuel Beckett published in 1964. It consists of a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through apparently endless mud, and reminisces on his life. The mud appears to be a kind of purgatory.
The title is Beckett's translation of the original French, Comment c'est, a pun on commencer or 'to begin'.
The theme may be the struggle of form to emerge from formlessness using Leopardi's sense of the world as mud ('E fango è il mondo'), as well as Dante's image of souls gulping mud in the Stygian marsh of the Inferno (Canto VII, 109-126, in Palma's translation):
Dante's Belacqua and his foetal position also are referenced in How It Is and the following quotation may serve to illustrate the work's unpunctuated, dense and poetic style:
The text is divided into three parts:
1. "before Pim" - the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming a "couple".
2. "with Pim" - the narrator is motionless in the mud...
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