Samuel Beckett's poetics of ageing in a greying world

Résumé

This essay of literary criticism explores the representation of ageing, senescence, memory loss, and bodily decline in the theatre and radio drama of Samuel Beckett (Dublin 1906 - Paris 1989). Through close readings of milestones such as Happy Days, Rockaby, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Footfalls, and radio plays like All That Fall, Embers, Not I, and Words and Music, this volume examines how Beckett transformed later life into one of the most powerful poetic and visual engines of the twentieth century, anticipating the very demographic and existential crises that define our twenty-first century reality. His characters inhabit worlds shaped by solitude, repetition, and the progressive dissolution of identity, suspended between memory and oblivion, voice and silence. By crossing the boundaries of literary criticism, theatre studies, disability studies, and age studies, this investigation reveals how body and time merge in Beckett’s dramatic imagination, proving his radical relevance to contemporary anxieties surrounding social isolation and cognitive decay. Far from offering sentimental portraits, Beckett exposes human vulnerability with pitiless irony and extraordinary intensity, providing an essential study of ageing as both a physical condition and a profound existential experience that speaks directly and urgently to the modern condition.