Cover -- Contents -- INTRODUCTION -- "Metaphysical vision" -- Schopenhauer out of fashion -- Beckett his student -- Intentions and limits -- PART ONE METAPHYSICS OF ART AND LIFE -- ON SCHOPENHAUER'S AESTHETICS AND WORLD VIEW -- Premises from Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge and metaphysics -- Dissolution of self and creation of art -- The truly metaphysical activity of this life -- Idea and sensory perception -- Symbols trivial -- Realism vulgar -- Every thing beautiful -- Genius objective -- Bliss, not just pleasure -- Will-less, not just disinterested -- Music -- Tragedy and the vanity of life -- Denial of the Will-to-live -- Affirmation of the Will-to-live -- Happiness negative -- Suffering productive -- The metaphysical drama -- Timeless present, no ending -- Life -- suicide no escape -- The primacy of nothingness -- True reality and caricature of reality -- BECKETT'S PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF ART AND LIFE IN PROUST -- Idea versus concept -- Causality, time, will -- Habit -- Two kinds of memory -- Vulgarity -- Death of habit - waking madness -- Purity, impurity -- The necessity of art -- Schopenhauer made use of -- Schopenhauer altered -- The Proustian equation - the Proustian solution -- Affirmation of the will. Voluntarily Tantalus -- Desert of loneliness. No morality -- Existence of the artist -- PART TWO ON SOME DETAILS IN BECKETT'S LITERARY WORK -- MURPHY -- I am not of the big world, I am of the little world -- Vision -- Will-lessness, yearning for Nothing -- Remnants of a pensum -- MORAN -- A work which will subsist -- Finality without end -- Images of this kind the will cannot revive -- Dispossessed of self -- What if we were one and the same after all -- THE UNNAMABLE -- There is no pronoun for me -- I have a -- to discharge -- I'm all these words -- I am doing my best and failing: new thoughts about art and the artist.

In a cage out of time and space -- GOGO AND DIDI, HAMM AND CLOV -- In a single night -- You pollute the air -- Is it not time for my pain-killer? -- This is not boring you I hope -- Why will you never let me sleep? -- Old endgame lost of old -- The form of life is the endless present -- Since that's the way we're playing it, let's play it that way -- Schopenhauer made use of -- CONCLUDING REMARKS -- Schopenhauer altered -- Schopenhauer left behind -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX.