Becketts creatures : art of failure after the Holocaust In the shadow of the Holocaust Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to fail better. But what might it mean to be a creature or creaturely in Becketts world In the first full length study of the concept of the creature in Becketts prose and drama this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Becketts ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Becketts prose and drama particularly texts from the middle period including Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable Waiting for Godot and Endgame Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme testimony power humour and survival to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno Agamben Benjamin Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation the creature emerges as an in between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Becketts treatment of testimony power humour and survival which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz Machine generated contents note: Introduction What is a Beckettian Creature Last Human and Becoming Animal Concepts of the Creature and Creaturely Life Beckett After 1945 Testimony: Bearing Witness to the Event and Self. Impossibility of Expressing: Art of Failure and Lacuna of Testimony Fallibility and Dissociation (In)sovereign Author Narrators Obligation to Testify: Mechanics Enunciation Ruins Testimony of Fiction Power: Master Servant Relationships. Exercising Writing: Fascist Regime Against Liberal Art Watt the Fungible and Knott There: Objectified Servant and Absent Master A vague supplication: Melancholy in Waiting for Godot Master Servant Context: The Holocaust and the Jewish Creature Biopolitical Struggles: Territory and Custody Humour: Failure and Degradation. Humour in Failure Textual Performances Words and Flesh in Endgame Metanarrative Tragicomedy turd waiting for the flush: Gallows Humour Survival: Incompleteness and Continuation. oh all to end: Beckettian Stirrings Still Creaturely Undeadness Repetition and Performance Forms of Activity and Stasis in Molloy finish dying: Death Without Death in Molloy Epilogue