I still remember my first exposure to Beckett, in the form of (somewhat expectedly) Waiting for Godot. I was then fifteen, if memory serves me right; and as yet unschooled in the rites and mythologies of western theatre. Thus, the play, which had baffled critical wisdom upon its first appearance, was immediately accessible to a fifteen-year-old’s imagination; and the response it elicited was also immediate—I found it utterly repugnant.

It was a time when I lived in the pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, or in the labyrinths of Greek mythology. The world was quite monochromatic–literature had to be heroic, godlike, grand; and if it wasn’t, it wasn’t worthy of consideration. And here was Beckett, official spokesperson of everything my classically heroic conception of being found contemptible: pessimism, despair, and what seemed like a perverse hopelessness.