How It Is (Comment c’est, 1961; English version 1964) by Samuel Beckett (Key Facts)

 

How It Is (Comment c’est, 1961; English version 1964)

by Samuel Beckett

(Key Facts) 

Key Facts — How It Is by Samuel Beckett

 

Full Title

How It Is

(Originally published in French as Comment c’est)

 

Author

Samuel Beckett

 

Type of Work

Experimental novel / existential prose narrative

 

Genre

Absurdist fiction

Existential literature

Avant-garde / postmodern experimental prose

 

Language

Originally written in French; later translated into English by Samuel Beckett himself

 

Time and Place Written

Written in the late 1950s–early 1960s, primarily in France

 

Date of First Publication

1961 (French version); 1964 (English version)

 

Publisher

Éditions de Minuit (French edition)

 

Tone

Bleak, oppressive, fragmented, nihilistic, detached, grimly persistent

 

Setting (Time)

Indeterminate and timeless; existence unfolds in an eternal present with no clear past or future

 

Setting (Place)

A dark, muddy, undefined landscape with no geographic markers; an abstract, symbolic environment rather than a realistic location

 

Protagonist

The unnamed narrator — a crawling, speaking consciousness reduced to bodily endurance and fragmented thought

 

Major Conflict

The struggle to exist, endure, and articulate being in a meaningless world governed by repetition, suffering, and unstable identity

 

Rising Action

The narrator’s continuous crawling through mud, his reflections on memory and language, and his encounter with Pim, which introduces domination, cruelty, and relational structure

 

Climax

The realization that roles of master and victim are cyclical and interchangeable—that the narrator may once have been Pim and may become him again

 

Falling Action

The breakdown of Pim, the narrator’s abandonment of him, and the return to solitary crawling, reinforcing the endlessness of the cycle

 

Themes

Existence as endurance rather than purpose

Failure and necessity of language

Instability of identity

Power, domination, and suffering

Meaninglessness and repetition

Memory as unreliable construction

 

Motifs

Crawling

Darkness

Repetition

Bodily pain and exhaustion

Fragmented speech

Cycles of domination and abandonment

 

Symbols

Mud: The weight and degradation of existence

Darkness: Epistemological blindness and uncertainty

Crawling: Reduced humanity and forced persistence

Pim: Victimhood and interchangeable identity

Sack of tins: Survival without comfort or meaning

Broken language: Collapse of coherent meaning

 

Foreshadowing

The narrator’s early uncertainty about his past and repeated hints of earlier suffering foreshadow the later revelation that identities and roles are cyclical. The narrator’s domination of Pim implicitly predicts his own future victimization, reinforcing the inevitability of role reversal and repetition.

 

Concluding Note

Taken together, these elements reveal How It Is as a novel that dismantles traditional narrative structure to expose existence in its rawest form. Beckett replaces plot with process, character with condition, and meaning with endurance—offering not answers, but an unrelenting depiction of being “as it is.”