Most people most of the time want to live for ever. But there is another truth - the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit and humour, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient-enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition, an age of transplants and life-support. But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, give life to the not-simply-welcome encroachments of death? After all, it is for the life, the vitality of their language that society values writers. As a young man, Beckett himself said of Joyce's words: "They are alive". Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death. In cliches, which are dead but won't lie down. In a language and its memeto mori. In words which mean their own opposites, cleaving and cleaving. In the self-stultifying, or even suicidal fury that is styled the Irish bull. In what Beckett called the syntax of weakness. This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and death.