Beckett’s Three Dialogues the key to his oeuvre In 1949, Samuel Beckett wrote a series of conversations between himself and a friend, George Duthuit. In these conversations, named Three Dialogues, Beckett and Duthuit discuss the works of three contemporary artists, Pierre Tal Coat, Andre Masson, and Bram van Velde. Three Dialogues was published in the second Transition, an experimental literary journal, and was written by Beckett and edited by George Duthuit. The history of the Three Dialogues is very important because prior to 1965, Three Dialogues was only ever published in fragments, aside from the original publication. These fragments were often placed out of context and looked as though they had been written in support of artist Bram van Velde. This lack of full publication lead to the piece being under examined and sometimes not fully understood. Over the years many critics have suggested that the Three Dialogues offers a special access to Beckett’s work, that they act as a key to his oeuvre. Some critics view the dialogues as the end of Beckett’s aesthetic development, some view it as a blue print for his following works, while others see it as a credo or manifesto like piece. Overall, weather you view it as the key, or merely another work, Three Dialogues definitely hints at, and sets up the future for Beckett’s collection of works. Three Dialogues foreshadows future structures, makes a template for character duos and dialogue, and most importantly sets up the overriding theme of, to be an artist is to fail. The Three Dialogues stands out among Beckett’s critical works, not just because it gives an inside look to Beckett’s inner mechanics, but because of its structure, the form in which it was written, the style of that of a play script. Though the three dialogues is technically an art criticism of contemporary painters, it plays out exactly like a script written for actors. Three Dialogues “stars” two characters named ‘B’ and ‘D’. As a reader of a criticism, we assume that B and D are representative of Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, but nowhere in history does it say that this is fact. Three Dialogues is a fictitious conversation Beckett wrote that may or may not have occurred at one point between himself and friend George Duthuit. So for the purpose of the play analogy, B and D are two more of Beckett’s many character duos. To further the play like structure, the Three Dialogues are broken into three parts, Dialogue I, II, and III, one could assume that these “dialogues” are in fact acts. This breaking apart of the dialogues also leads one to assume that they may not have taken place all at once, but instead over a period of time. In Dialogue III there is a direction that says a fortnight later, insinuating that B took fourteen days to reply to D. Also included alongside the lines in Three Dialogues, are minor stage directions. For example at the end of Dialogue II, B is directed to (exit weeping). In Dialogue III, B has a few different stage directions such as, (prepares to go), and (remembering, warmly). Can one even call something with stage directions anything other than a play? Yes, with marked dialogue between B and D, and the section breakdowns we could still call this a criticism of art, but with the added directions and riposte of the characters it definitely moves beyond that. With characters, lines, acts, and stage directions, Three Dialogues is unequivocally an art criticism turned Beckett play. Samuel Beckett’s comedic duos are well known and show up throughout his entire oeuvre. Some of the most famous of these duos being Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) from Waiting for Godot, and Hamm and Clov, and Nagg and Nell from Endgame. These characters are best known for their back and forth banter. Along this notion of back and forth, we could add in B and D to the list of duos. B and D have such a dramatic and sometimes comedic interchange, it could very well be seen as a blue print for Beckett’s famous duos to come. One interaction between Clov and Hamm in Endgame can be seen in a similar manner to that of the interactions of B and D in Three Dialogues.
HAMM: Have you not had enough? CLOV: Yes! (Pause.) Of what?
HAMM: Of this... this... thing.
CLOV: I always had. (Pause.) Not you?
HAMM (gloomily): Then there's no reason for it to change.
CLOV: It may end. (Pause.) All lifelong the same questions, the same answers.
HAMM: Get me ready. (Clov does not move.) Go and get the sheet. (Clov does not move.) Clov!
CLOV: Yes.
HAMM: I'll give you nothing more to eat. CLOV: Then we'll die.
HAMM: I'll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You'll be hungry all the time.
CLOV: Then we won't die. (Pause.) I'll go and get the sheet. (He goes towards the door.)
HAMM: No! (Clov halts.) I'll give you one biscuit per day. (Pause.) One and a half. (Pause.)
Why do you stay with me?
CLOV: Why do you keep me?
HAMM: There's no one else.
CLOV: There's nowhere else. (Pause.)
HAMM: You're leaving me all the same.
CLOV: I'm trying.
HAMM: You don't love me.
CLOV: No.
HAMM: You loved me once.
CLOV: Once!
HAMM: I've made you suffer too much. (Pause.) Haven't I?
CLOV: It's not that.
HAMM: I haven't made you suffer too much?
CLOV: Yes!
HAMM (relieved): Ah, you gave me a fright!(Pause. Coldly) Forgive me. (Pause. Louder.) I said, Forgive me.
CLOV: I heard you. (Pause.)
In Endgame Clov is constantly shutting down Hamm, answering his silly rants and worries, with somewhat sarcastic straightforward answers, very similar to the way that D continually deflates B's more robust arguments. Like Clov, D has such an expertise in countering B’s arguments that he creates a rare moment within all of Beckett’s works, he renders a fellow character speechless:
B. -- [...] the only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.
D. -- What other plane can there be for the maker?
B. -- Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.
D. -- And preferring what?
B. -- The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
D. -- But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat.
B. --
D. -- Perhaps that is enough for to-day.

Like with Clov and Hamm, D is the straight man to B’s comedy, though the above excerpt is not humorous, it follows, or perhaps creates, the set up that all Beckett duos will follow: one character shutting down the nonsense of another. This set up can be seen in almost all of the duos. It shows through in Vladimir and Estragon physically and verbally, with Vladimir standing through most of Waiting for Godot, where his counterpart Estragon sits down for most of the play and even falls asleep. Vladimir is restless looking to the sky and contemplating religious and philosophical themes. Estragon is less bothered, more stationary thinking of mundane things like what he can eat and complaining of his physical aches and pains. Opposite characters, Vladimir keeps Estragon in line, like Clov cares for Hamm, and D checks B. Besides the structure and character profiles set up in Three Dialogues perhaps the most concrete evidence that it is the entry way into Samuel Beckett’s mind comes from the themes and ideas produced. Of all Beckett's non-creative writings, Three Dialogues is the one that is most used as a key of entry into Beckett's oeuvre. Even more specific than the work itself, it is the one sentence, from the first dialogue discussing the artist Tal Coat. Perhaps the most quoted line from all three dialogues:
The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
In Drama, Criticism and Manifesto: Beckett's “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”, Paul Stewart speaks of this sentence saying:
If any single sentence might capture the Beckettian programme, one feels that this would be it. All the elements are there; nothing looms large, failure is present, the need to go on no less so, the impossibility of so doing: all enshrined by paradox and sparse enunciation.
We will come back to the importance of the failure element being present in a moment, first we must recognize D’s response to this most quotable sentence. D. -- And preferring what?
B. -- The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
D. -- But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat.
B. --
D. -- Perhaps that is enough for to-day
Yes D does render B speechless, but before that he says something very telling for when one is trying to read Three Dialogues as a guide book to Beckett. The accusation D makes of that statement being a "personal point of view" is what ultimately flabbergasts B. If one can forget that the discussion is on Tal Coat, D is forcing B to realise that B is Beckett speaking supposedly about another but truly about himself. In Three Dialogues Beckett most wants to get across the point, “to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.” And by D’s pointing out, we know that B is expressing his own points of view, so one can conclude that for Beckett being an artist is failing, but one must do it anyway. Or as Paul Stewart says, “Beckett’s narrators know very well the ridiculousness of telling stories, and this in no sense frees them from the task of doing so. As long as there is speech and reason, there remains the task of achieving clarity and speaking well, and this task does not disappear.” This quote of Beckett’s narrators telling stories to death, and Beckett’s need to fail, is perhaps best seen in action in Beckett’s novel Molloy. The first part of the novel Molloy is about Molloy’s life but written by an older version of Molloy looking back. He was a hobo in his younger years, but now he is confined to a bed awaiting his death. The story begins with Molloy trying to ride a bicycle into town, and when he stops to rest he is yelled at by a police man.
What are you doing here? he said. I’m used to that question, I understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried. So it always is when I’m reduced to confabulation, I honestly believe I have answered the question I am asked and in reality I do nothing of the kind. I won’t reconstruct the conversation in all its meanderings. It ended in my understanding that my way of resting, my attitude when at rest, astride my bicycle, my arms on the handlebars, my head on my arms, was a violation of I don’t know what, public order, public decency.
Molloy is then taken in by the police officer, but he does not complain: he acknowledges the policeman’s point, that he is a violation of decency. Though he thinks he isn’t to blame, he tries his best in life to avoid these acts of indecency but he says it requires an education he was never lucky enough to receive. This interaction with the police officer contains much of Beckett’s theory of the novel. In most stories we as the reader can answer the simple questions of what the characters are doing, why they seem to be doing it, how they came to be where they are. In Molloy, we gain none of these answers, as shown from the policeman’s line of questioning. Another way Beckett is “failing” from the usual novel is through his destruction and limitation of his characters bodies. Beckett likes to place his characters in all different sorts of physical constraint. In the play Endgame, both Nagg and Nell live in trashcans completely confined, in Play the characters are crammed into small, barely human size urns. In most stories the temperament of the body is merely a metaphor for the temperament of its soul. In Beckett’s characters the body acts as a machine, breaking down constantly, in need of uptake and repair. Michael Kinnucan author of Beckett and Failure says of this body constraint:
Oddly, though, Beckett is never more comforting, never warmer and funnier, than when he describes the physical decay of his characters. They are peripatetic cripples nearly to the man, and they keep going nonetheless. When they can’t walk they hobble, when they can’t hobble they crawl, when they can’t crawl they drag themselves along the ground by grabbing at the underbrush ahead of them, and when they can’t manage that anymore they roll along the ground in great graceful arcs. They are deterred neither by their deep uncertainty about where they want to go nor by the manifest impossibility, given physical limitations, of ever getting there. They are endowed with a technical resourcefulness made comically futile by their physical decay and a kind of bloody-minded persistence which has nothing to do with courage. Beckett’s admiration for this quality in human beings—it is, I think, what he loves best in us—echoes Melville’s: what could be more touching in us than the craft and madness with which we project our puny bodies out over the deep, toward futile goals or none at all?
This need to continue on, to drag a body through life is shown in most of Beckett’s works in one sense or another. That even if these bodies are failing or the people themselves are failing, they must persist forward. By reducing the physical capabilities of his characters, Beckett has them do nothing more than keep moving forward, and they seem to desire nothing else.
Three Dialogues can be seen as many things, an art criticism, a play, a manifesto, but mainly the overarching key to all of Beckett’s work. This simple short fictions dialogue between two friends Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, B and D, reveals more of Beckett’s inner workings then Beckett himself as ever revealed. He attempted to write a dialogue to critically analyse the state of contemporary art, by discussing artists Tal Coat, Masson, and van Velde, but instead created a play with lively sometimes comedic dialogue. Beckett’s overall wish from Three Dialogues seemed to become, “to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.” And this sentiment is something that has permeated through all of Beckett.

Bibliography
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Beckett, Samuel. 2006. Endgame. Ebook. 1st ed. http://www.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/engl/026/002/PDFs/Endgame.pdf.
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