FRAGMENTED IDENTITY OF THE SPEAKING SUBJECT IN BECKETT’S FOOTFALLS: THE AUTHENTIC SELF AND ITS INTERNAL OTHERS

Abstract

The act of “seeing” or more precisely, realizing “the ill around and within us” necessitates a mode of expression that does not mask disturbance but instead echoes its fractured rhythms. Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls, marked by its fragmented structure, spectral characters and playful language, falls into this category. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma as a belated, unassimilable experience that resists narrative coherence, this paper explores how the play reflects and enacts psychological trauma. At the center is May, a ghostly figure engaged in repetitive pacing and fragmented dialogue with a Woman’s Voice who is presumed to be her mother but arguably a projection of May’s own fractured psyche. Through this lens, the play becomes more about dramatizing the breakdown of a unified self. Accordingly, May is not an authentic, coherent subject but an embodiment of the internal other. Employing Jacques Derrida’s concepts of différance and the instability of presence, the paper argues that Footfalls disrupts conventional binaries such as self/other, presence/absence, and voice/silence and accordingly, the ambiguity of the speaking self, combined with the lack of verifiable reality within the play’s world, destabilizes reader/audience expectations and invites multiple, even contradictory interpretations. The play, thus, becomes a site where language falters, the self dissolves, and trauma endlessly replays, foregrounding the impossibility of arriving at a final or stable truth.