The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts from Abroad in Watt

Abstract

The significance of the Second World War in Europe as an impactful historical event in Beckett’s life cannot be overstated, but it must also be borne in mind that the whole of his life to that point was experienced in the shadow of an equally strong environment of political, military and social upheaval in his native country. Born in Ireland in 1906, he witnessed the unsuccessful military rebellion of 1916, the prolonged guerrilla war of Independence of 1919–1921, and the short but savage Civil War of 1922–1923. While certainly unequal in scale, the uncertainty and violence Beckett experienced in France from 1939 to 1945 should be read as a continuum which began for him with the mayhem that ultimately led to the creation of the Irish Free State. With this in mind, this chapter argues that the political concerns of early twentieth-century Irish life, which are inescapable given their ubiquity in the national discourse, informed much of Beckett’s thinking when he came to compose the novel Watt.