Structure
In Waiting for Godot, Beckett uses aspects of Judeo-Christianity as the template for his play, in Film the template is the writings of Bishop Berkeley, and in Krapp’s Last Tape, according to Anthony Cronin, he uses Manichaenism as a structural device:
The dichotomy of light and dark … is central to Manichaean doctrine … Its adherents believed that the world was ruled by evil powers, against which the god of the whole of creation struggled as yet in vain … Krapp is in violation of the three seals or prohibitions of Manichaenism for the elect: the seal of the hands, forbidding engagement in a profession, the seal of the breast against sexual desire, and the seal of the mouth, which forbids the drinking of wine … Beckett seems to have known no more about Manichaenism than is contained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which he possessed.
Read more about this topic: Krapp's Last Tape
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.”
—Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)