It is possible to see the work of Samuel Beckett as stranded somewhere between modernist and postmodernist cases. In his sense of the extreme elusiveness of meaning (his favourite word, he once remarked, was ‘perhaps’), Beckett is classically modernist. His writing is woven through from end to end with a sense of its own provisionality, ironically aware that it might just as well never have existed. This is why it seems only just to exist – to hover precariously on the edge of articulation, before lapsing listlessly away into some wordless darkness. It is as thin as is compatible with being barely perceptible. Meaning flares and fades, erasing itself almost as soon as it emerges. One pointless narrative cranks itself laboriously off the ground, only to be aborted in mid-stream for another, equally futile one. There is not even enough meaning to be able to give a name to what is awry with us.