Company

Company is the most recent prose work by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and other great works of the post-World War II era. In Company, a man lying on his back in the darkness of an enclosed room hears a voice speaking to him or to some other being. The voice reminisces about significant moments in some person's life: a young child being scolded by his mother for asking about the distance of the sky, a child being born while his father takes a walk to avoid the horrors of childbirth, a man wondering whether his lover is pregnant, a child being born the day Christ died. The relentless voice finally tells the man that words are ending, that the idea of one with you in the dark is only a fable. In the final moment, we find the man alone, ready for the metaphoric cycle to begin anew. Beckett has reduced the story line of Company to the sparest of prose which, in its distilled form, accentuates what Alvarado Alvarez calls his unfailing stylistic control and economy of language, his remorseless stripping away of superfluities. In Company we find the familiar themes from Beckett's earlier work, here reshaped and transfigured, in what is probably the most remarkable literary exploration of our day.