First Love (Première amour) by Samuel Beckett (Summary)

 

First Love (Première amour)

by Samuel Beckett

(Summary) 

First Love —Summary

The narrator begins by announcing, with blunt indifference, that his father has died. The news does not move him to grief. Instead, it marks a practical inconvenience: he has lost the place where he lived. The house, now inherited by his brothers, is no longer available to him. With no ceremony, no protest, and no nostalgia, he leaves.

He drifts through the city without plan or desire, sleeping on benches and wandering streets. His relationship to the world is marked by withdrawal and irritation. He avoids people instinctively. When he sits, it is often beside a canal, staring at the water in a state that is neither contemplation nor peace, but dull endurance.

It is on one of these benches that he first encounters Lulu, though he does not know her name at the time. She approaches him without invitation, speaks to him without encouragement, and remains beside him despite his silence and evident hostility. He finds her presence intrusive and her conversation pointless. Yet she persists.

Eventually, through repeated meetings, he learns her name—Lulu—though later she insists on being called Anna, as if reshaping herself for respectability. She offers him shelter in her small rented room. He accepts, not out of affection or gratitude, but because it is easier than continuing to wander.

Their cohabitation is awkward and joyless. The narrator arranges his life to minimize contact with her. He establishes rigid habits: pacing the room, measuring his steps, calculating distances, counting movements. He speaks little, listens less, and resents Lulu’s attempts at conversation. She, meanwhile, attempts to care for him—bringing food, talking, touching him—gestures that he tolerates with thinly veiled disgust.

Despite this emotional emptiness, they engage in a sexual relationship. The narrator experiences it not as intimacy but as a physical nuisance. He finds the act confusing, uncomfortable, and vaguely offensive. Love, desire, or pleasure are never named as motives. He cannot understand why Lulu seems attached to him, nor why she expects anything in return.

Time passes indistinctly. Seasons change, though the narrator registers them only through bodily discomfort. Lulu becomes pregnant. This development irritates him deeply. The idea of another being intruding into his controlled isolation is intolerable. He withdraws further into himself, spending hours standing motionless or pacing obsessively.

When the child is born, the narrator is overwhelmed—not by tenderness, but by revulsion and panic. The baby’s cries shatter the fragile order he has constructed. He cannot bear the noise, the smell, the presence. Lulu’s suffering, exhaustion, and vulnerability leave him unmoved.

One night, unable to endure the disruption any longer, he leaves.

He does not say goodbye.

He does not look back.

He walks away into the night, relieved to be free of the room, the woman, and the child. There is no regret, no reflection on responsibility, no acknowledgment of loss. He returns to the streets, to benches, to solitude.

The story ends where it began: with the narrator alone, wandering, intact in his isolation. His “first love” has not altered him. It has only confirmed his estrangement from others and from life itself.

 

What the Story Ultimately Shows

Though titled First Love, the narrative systematically undermines every expectation of romance or emotional growth. Love is presented not as connection but as intrusion. Human relationships are shown as burdens rather than sources of meaning.

Beckett’s narrator is not cruel in the conventional sense; he is emptied, emotionally anesthetized, incapable of reciprocity. The tragedy lies not in heartbreak but in absence: absence of feeling, of moral engagement, of transformation.

The story is bleak, ironic, and quietly devastating—an early articulation of Beckett’s lifelong exploration of isolation, bodily existence, and the failure of human bonds.