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Isn’t a genuine meaning one which we feel ourselves running up against, one which can resist or rebuff us, one which bears in on us with a certain ineluctability?

immanence does not necessarily imply transcendence. A meaning to life put there by God, and one conjured up by ourselves, may not be the only possibilities.

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 …

the cheerless challenge of a Schopenhauer. His work forces them to struggle hard to make their vision seem anything more than anodyne consolation.