사무엘 베케트의 라디오 극 연구

Abstract

Quite a few critics have criticized bitterly Beckett's capabilities as a playwright by referring to infantile and imbecile elements in the early works. In spite of unfavorable opinions of that kind, however, Beckett never stopped the attempt to expand a dramatic meaning and realm, but rather he wrote a mass media-radio plays in order to deliver just ‘voices’ out of stage as a visual and acoustic condition of existence. Due to the characteristic of radio drama which links speakers to listeners solely by voices, radio drama has far stronger power transmitting meaning than stage play, as Martin Esslin's paradoxical mention, “radio is a highly visual mass media.” Beckett's humour is ever present in his work, on the other hand, but his despair, and perhaps his writing in general, is often easier to listen to than to comprehend. In this light, his interests in new mass media led him to writing six radio plays and four television drama between 1957 and 1982. My first chapter, therefore, concentrated on some aspects of mass media-radio as well as radio drama. The radio drama can be defined as a story spoken into dramatic form simply by means of voices. The most advantages of radio [drama] is the fact that it provides listeners with infinite potentials for imagination. Listeners to radio drama imagine and create everything by altering acoustic and visual language into their own visual and spatial one. In the subsequent chapters, I have emphasized on Beckett's radio plays in order to show how his concerns are presented in a mode of radio drama which takes on the aesthetic shapes and unique qualities of mass media. I have dealt primarily with the two longer plays: All that Fall(1956) and Embers(1959). Beckett's radio drama helped to illustrate that the purely sound-based nature of radio made it possible for Beckett to provide an environment for his characters where their silence is not just more than the lack of words but also a demonstration of complete anonymity. In addition, Beckett embodied impossibility for communication with image of death in All that Fall as well as one for creative expression in Embers. As a result, Beckett explores earnestly and deeply the world of ambiguity in which every human being lives, by trying expansion of both typical meaning and theme through new mass media-radio having intrinsic mechanism for producing meaning.