I Shall Live On

Fizzle 4 is another of Beckett's "ars poetica" moments. While framed as the discussion of someone's death, I think Beckett, as he is wont to do, is actually examining what he thinks will happen to his work after his death. He clearly knows that what he's doing is intellectual fodder, ripe for constant investigation. After all, if you spend your life constantly plumbing the depths of your own psyche in such an intense way as he did, people will take notice.

I started the semester wondering how it was possible that Beckett could so accurately capture that which happens inside the human mind, how he could seemingly render the ineffable thought processes we all experience so beautiful and tangible. I still haven't figured it out. None of us have and it's likely that none of us ever will. That doesn't mean, however, that we will not try. Fizzle 4 is Beckett predicting how hard we will all try, sympathizing with our futile attempts. He personifies his own writing in this little excerpt and challenges the artistic notion that art lives within he artist. Rather, Beckett posits that art houses us like a shell full of stuff. Once we discover the stuff, we interpret the stuff. Art is not something we channel, it's something we exist within.

It is in this way that Beckett is immortal. All authors are immortal.