Interpretation of the Return Motif of Ulysses in the Early Novels of S. Beckett

Abstract

The Ulysses’s motif of return in More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy by S. Beckett becomes a key theme. Belacqua Shuah and Murphy strive for being at home, as well as Bloom and Odysseus. The main character of More Pricks Than Kicks Belacqua Shuah wanders from one of his beloved to another, that can be a reflection of Odysseus’s wanders. Bloom’s coming back home is reconsidered by S. Beckett: Belacqua and Murphy die in the end of the novels. The idea of coming back is also represented by Belacqua’s concept about the way of boomerang in More Pricks Than Kicks and the way that loops the loop like an eight, following which however you don’t return to the place where you started, but going down you meet yourself, ‘going up’. Stephen’s ‘silence, exile and cunning’ and Bloom’s ‘coming back was the worst thing you ever did’ is played up by S. Beckett as ‘Doubt, Despair and Scrounging’ in More Pricks Than Kicks. In More Pricks Than Kicks the image of a bicycle, inherited from Ulysses, symbolize the increasing mechanization of human’s life, and in Murphy the image of a bicyle is replaced by a rocking-chair, Murphy strives for ‘state’ movement, movement at the same place.