How It Is
After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as "Texts for Nothing". In the late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, "Comment c'est" (1961; "How It Is"). An early variant version of "Comment c'est", "L'Image", was published in the British arts review, "X: A Quarterly Review" (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form. This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark" Following this work, it was almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. "How It Is" is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer.