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

 

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

by Samuel Beckett

(Analysis) 

Analysis of How It Is by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett’s How It Is stands as one of the most radical experiments in twentieth-century literature, a work that confronts the reader with existence reduced to its most elemental conditions. Through its fragmented language, cyclical structure, and bleak imagery, the novel explores the nature of human consciousness, the instability of identity, and the persistence of suffering in a world devoid of meaning. Rather than telling a story in the conventional sense, How It Is enacts an experience—one of endurance, repetition, and uncertain selfhood.

One of the most striking features of the novel is its formal fragmentation. Beckett eliminates punctuation and conventional sentence structure, producing a text that mimics the broken rhythms of thought and breath. Language no longer functions as a transparent medium for meaning; instead, it becomes a record of mental struggle. The narrator’s phrases emerge haltingly, often repeated or revised, suggesting a mind grasping for coherence in an environment that offers none. This stylistic disruption reflects Beckett’s belief that language is both necessary and inadequate: it is the only means of asserting existence, yet it continually fails to capture reality with clarity or certainty.

The setting of mud and darkness serves as a powerful symbolic landscape. Stripped of social context, history, and geography, the world of How It Is represents existence at its most primitive level. The mud immobilizes the body, turning movement into labor and progress into illusion. Darkness erases vision, forcing the narrator inward, toward memory and imagination—both of which prove unreliable. This environment externalizes the narrator’s psychological state: consciousness itself is mired, resistant, and obscure. Beckett thus collapses the distinction between inner and outer worlds, presenting suffering as both physical and metaphysical.

Central to the novel is the cyclical relationship between domination and submission, most clearly embodied in the pairing of the narrator and Pim. Their relationship is defined by violence, control, and dependency. The narrator’s authority over Pim is neither justified nor explained; it simply exists as part of the system. Yet this power is temporary and reversible. The narrator gradually realizes that he may once have occupied Pim’s position and may do so again. Through this cycle, Beckett undermines stable notions of identity and morality. Master and victim are not moral categories but interchangeable roles within an endless pattern of suffering.

Memory plays a crucial role in the narrator’s attempt to impose meaning on his condition. The narrator recalls—or believes he recalls—a time before the mud, a world of light and human interaction. However, these memories are fragmented and possibly derived from books or secondhand sources rather than lived experience. Beckett thereby questions the reliability of memory as a foundation for identity. The past does not offer explanation or consolation; instead, it adds another layer of uncertainty. Memory becomes a narrative the mind invents to survive the present.

The novel’s absence of resolution reinforces its philosophical pessimism. There is no redemption, revelation, or escape from the mud. The ending does not conclude but simply stops, suggesting that existence continues beyond the final page in the same repetitive manner. This refusal of closure aligns How It Is with Beckett’s broader absurdist vision, in which human life is characterized not by progress or purpose but by persistence. Meaning is not discovered; it is endured—or abandoned altogether.

Ultimately, How It Is can be read as a meditation on the minimal conditions of being. When social structures, moral frameworks, and coherent narratives are stripped away, what remains is a suffering body and a struggling voice. Yet the voice continues to speak. In this persistence lies the novel’s bleak paradox: although existence appears meaningless and cruel, the act of articulation itself becomes a form of resistance. Beckett does not offer hope, but he affirms endurance—the grim, stubborn continuation of consciousness in the face of nothingness.