Amy Dillon
ENG 382
6/12/14
Doctor O’Halloran
Perception and First Love
Perception is the insight that guides the reader. Characters display it, writers feel it. In all of Beckett’s work, characters have intuition and try to make sense of the scene before them. In Beckett’s writing, his ability to delve deep into the minds of characters give an extra psychological take on the mind. In First Love, Beckett’s stream of consciousness style allows the reader to view a character that goes through a phase in his life; from maturity to immaturity, from unawareness to awareness. How, then, would the master of abstraction perceive a whole story about love? The main character of First Love, a nameless narrator, experiences his first real love with a prostitute. The story begins with the narrator in a graveyard, visiting the grave of his father. Then he meets a prostitute, Lulu, whom he later renames Anna. After much conversing at a park bench, Lulu takes him in as a tenant, and they have sexual intercourse (Beckett 25-45). The insights and connections made in First Love are unique to the story because this is one of Beckett’s few works that gives off a sense of emotion through love, however quirky and peculiar it may be. In First Love, the narrator, reader, and writer perceive love as untraditional, quirky, antagonistic, and detached.
Throughout the story the reader perceives the narrator as ignorant to the idea of non-platonic love. Throughout some of Beckett’s works, the characters have multiple relationships with the opposite sex, while in this one the narrator feels love for the first time. The narrator can be understood by the reader as a novice of love, and immature to it. Even though he is a grown man, he still is learning and developing, which is harmonized with the fact that up to that point he had been taken care of by his father, who had just left him an inheritance (Beckett 27-28). After meeting his first love, he seems amazed and enraptured in everything, because he is always asking himself questions while thinking about Lulu, and in this way he invites the reader into the story. The narrator’s high sense of awareness is depicted through his display of self-consciousness when he reflects on his relationship with Lulu. Before the climax of the story, when he has intercourse with Lulu, the narrator says, “But I heard each word no sooner spoken. Never had my voice taken so long to reach me as on this occasion” (Beckett 41). This self- observation of the narrator demonstrates the self-consciousness of being in love, of the narrator, being totally aware of himself, and sensitive to everything that is going on around him. This quote shows the narrator being so in love that his very ability to speak is affected, that the way in which he views things obscured by love changes his physical being.
Beckett has a compelling source of characters in First Love; the narrator, the prostitute, and the narrator’s father. The narrator feels love for a prostitute. He feels equal to her, despite his belonging to another social class. The concept that love can come between any two people is apparent when these two characters meet because of the difference in social situations between the narrator and Lulu. The love between Lulu and the narrator is jarring to the reader in the way that they talk to each other, for instance where there is a sense of bitterness in their conversing on the park bench (Beckett 31). What is most aesthetically pleasing about the prose is that the narrator doesn’t have the average trite, cliché actions or thoughts towards the woman that he loves, although he does feel strongly toward Lulu. For instance, he says, “But before going, to be on the safe side, I asked her to sing me a song,” (Beckett 36). He feels so strongly towards her that his mind is constantly preoccupied with thoughts of her that make him question everything he does, or as S. Jean Walton, the author of “Extorting Love’s Tale from the Banished Son: Origins of Narratability in Samuel Beckett’s “First Love,”” an article that goes into detail about the plot and other details of First Love, puts it, “Indeed, from the moment he meets Lulu and perceives his attraction to her, his reactions consist of various forms of denial” (Walton 555). The narrator feels so strongly of the presence of Lulu that he cries (Walton 555). Beckett writes, “I saw her face a little clearer, it seemed normal to me, a face like a million others” (Beckett 38). This is some of the poetic language Beckett writes of the narrator implying that although Lulu is just another face in the crowd, he loves her. Perhaps Beckett is saying here there is something there besides physical observation that makes the narrator see Lulu as beautiful.
The narrator’s insight that pain would be more pleasing than feeling or living is one of the psychological connections made by Beckett in First Love. Essentially the narrator says that he understands pains better than what is going on around him, and he goes on to classify these pains; “those of the mind, those of the heart or emotional conative, those of the soul (none prettier than these) and then finally those of the frame proper…” (Beckett 33). Then he names different physical handicaps of the body. This is also apparent in Murphy were Murphy feels physical pain for enjoyment by strapping himself to a chair (Beckett 1). This passage in First Love where the narrator talks of only understanding pain in himself best clashes with the rest of the prose because the rest is about emotion and connecting with Lulu. The narrator of First Love also keeps himself from feeling anything where he feels an attraction towards Lulu and says, “The state I am in now! It was things made me weep. And yet I felt no sorrow,” (Beckett 36).
In commentary to the narrator’s father, Walton says, “…perhaps the son’s expulsion is within the intentions of the father after all, in an overall plan which the protagonist cannot understand from his perspective as an unfinished corpse….The father has reached the state of “great disembodied wisdom.” The son strives towards it” (Walton 554). This quote can be interpreted to infer that the narrator lacks the perception of his father’s true intent. Beckett is portraying the narrator’s father’s character as whole and finished, yet malicious, while the narrator is unfinished because he is fully alive in his experience of falling in love. Maybe the narrator sees the experience of falling in love as a means of vitality.
The reader also experiences cognizance through First Love. It seems that the narrator at the beginning of the story distinguishes the father as being a nuisance, because he doesn’t want to live in the house that he left him (Beckett 27-28). He wants to live on his own, and he needs to find a place to live, hence later in the story he moves in with Lulu. The narrator sees the lighthouses and city lights as objects that let him reminisce of his days as a youth (Beckett 44). It is ironic that the narrator refers to the lighthouses and city lights that his father showed him when he was a boy at the end of the story. Then he should see everything at that point of the story with more maturity, as a man, as he is soon to be a father. The reference to his father at the end of the story brings everything full circle, with the first pages where his father’s grave and the dates of his death and birth are discussed as something that he takes with him on a handwritten note (Beckett 25-29).
First Love may be interpreted by the reader as satirical because notions of a “first love,” include romance, soul mates, and marriage, but the themes of this story are bitterness, prostitutes and one night stands. Beckett can be very comical in absurd. However, this story works so well because while it is satirical in a sense that the relationship between the narrator and the prostitute has the narrator sketching his first love’s name in cow dung (Beckett 34), the language is offensive yet charming. The reader sees the narrator’s idea of his “first love” as ironic in the context of plot because the narrator needs Lulu out of necessity, for room and board.
While reading the story, the reader senses tones that vary. The tone of the story changes to serious, at the very beginning of the story, when the narrator’s father’s death is discussed, to more comical, when pertaining to more unusual things, like the atmosphere created by the narrator and Lulu when they meet. Later the tone is mysterious and open-ended. The tone changes when it is left unclear what happens between the narrator and Lulu, and their unborn child, and what the narrator’s intentions are as he walks away from Lulu’s house.
Reading First Love gives the reader the impression that love isn’t perfect. It gives the reader the notion that real love is something that can spring up anywhere, even between a prostitute and a man. When reading First Love Beckett shows how the narrator is very flawed and aggravated, yet able to overcome his rash thoughts, and see someone as beautiful and find happiness. Beckett’s style throughout the story is, in some places, raunchy and slapstick, such as when they discuss living situations --: “…No, she said, but I have running water and gas. Ha, I said, you have gas” (Beckett 39). Yet other instances of the story have much meaning, like the narrator’s thought of his childhood--: “I’d come out in the daytime to the heather and gorse all warmth and scent, and watch at night the distant city lights, if I choose, and the other lights, the lighthouses and lightships my father had named for me, when I was small, and whose names I could find again, in my memory, if I chose, that I knew” (Beckett 44). This quote gives meaning to the way in which the narrator observes things towards the end of the story, from childhood to maturity. First Love is pleasing to the reader because it has a real narrative and plot to it, something that is easy to understand, yet is very vivid and intense in language.
Beckett’s insight when writing the story must have been unique. It seems the way Beckett envisioned his story when writing it is that he wanted to illustrate love as something that doesn’t have to be completely romantic and stereotypical, but endearing in its own way, for instance, in tracing the name of the woman that you love’s name in “old heifer pat” (Beckett 34). Having a first love as a prostitute is something challenging to write about, and Beckett succeeded in depicting an instance of love through two imperfect people.
In conclusion, First Love is a story in which Beckett exhibits emotion and sentiment, unlike in many of his other works. The narrator perceives the world around him differently because of his relationship with Lulu; and in this feeling of love he enraptures himself, physically and mentally. The reader is left to interpret the narrator and Lulu’s relationship as one that isn’t trite, but unique. It can be argued that Beckett, as a writer, wanted his audience to see “love” in a new light, one that isn’t ideal, but perfect in its own way. These perceptions made by the narrator, the reader, and Beckett give the story meaning through the idea that love is always unique and challenging; that love changes the way that people look at the world.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. “First Love.” Samuel Beckett The Complete Short Prose. Ed. Gontarski, S.E.
New York: Grove Press, 1995. 25-45. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1938. Print.
Extorting Love’s Tale from the Banished Son: Origins of Narratability in Samuel Beckett’s
“First Love” S. Jean Walton. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter, 1988),
pp. 549-563 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Article DOI: 10.2307/1208465