Whether or not it features seven (or more) types of ambiguity, Christopher Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words displays at least three types of opacity: the opacity that comes from extreme compression, the opacity that derives from constant allusion and word play, and the opacity caused by a basic indifference to the reader’s comfort. I am a great admirer of Professor Ricks’s wit, erudition, and ability to make everything connect—whether by conjunction or mere disjunctive juxtaposition, to say as it were, “How revealingly different this is from that”—but I do not think that a commentary should be harder going than what it comments on. Especially if the text is Beckett’s oeuvre, which needs no further obscurity, however ingenious, shed upon it.

The very title offers fair warning. Beckett’s “dying words” can be (a) his last words, his legacy to the world; (b) his philosophy of death-in-life, of welcoming death as a relief from living; and (c) his cadences, the dying fall of his prose, the slow diminuendo that leads via a “syntax of weakness” almost imperceptibly to cessation.

In the first section, “Death,” Ricks examines the way the death wish permeates Beckett’s writing.

In the first section, “Death,” Ricks examines the way the death wish permeates Beckett’s writing. In the second, “Words That Went Dead,” Ricks considers modes of abstraction, the use of clichés, the way clichés can be resurrected into a “zombie life,” and the obituary as an art form (connection with Beckett dubious). This last