Beckett’s work poses […] the question of a troubling limit between literary language, as a cultural and ethical value, and a kind of speech that in its compulsive brutality crosses into an experience that must in some sense be considered “nonliterary.” “When one listens to oneself,” said Beckett in an interview, “it’s not literature that one hears.” The “vocation” of writing thus verges toward a harassing “vocalization” that bears its compulsions openly, risking an exposure that might exceed—that is, fall far short of— the categories that would dress it in more redemptive terms. There is more than a hint of shame to be read in some of Beckett’s hilarities and melancholies, and the residues of so much elimination and stripping away have affective tonalities, even […] an unexpected sentimentality, that it will be important to register in the bare but intensely charged figures that Beckett obsessively stages.

Jeff Fort, The Imperative To Write