Editors Reads Verdict
Watt is Beckett at his most exhaustingly comic: the novel's humor comes from Watt's compulsive attempt to account for everything that happens, including the infinite permutations of everything that might happen but didn't—and the reader's growing awareness that this is what consciousness is like.
What We Loved
- The most comic of Beckett's novels—Watt's enumerative compulsion is genuinely funny
- The philosophical machinery Beckett develops here underpins his entire subsequent career
- Written under extraordinary circumstances (wartime hiding), which gives it a peculiar intensity
- More accessible than the trilogy, while being essential preparation for understanding it
Minor Drawbacks
- The exhaustive enumeration sequences can feel genuinely exhausting rather than purely comic
- Mr. Knott's house has the quality of a puzzle without a solution, which some readers find maddening
- The addenda—fragments Beckett could not fit into the main text—are interesting but structurally odd
Key Takeaways
- → The compulsion to understand everything is both comic and constitutive of human consciousness
- → Understanding is not available—but this does not make the attempt to understand less necessary
- → Exhaustive enumeration of possibilities does not constitute knowledge of what actually happened
- → Language that tries to be completely precise eventually undermines its own precision
- → The domestic and the philosophical are, in Beckett's hands, the same territory
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Pages | 254 |
| Published | December 1, 1994 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction, Irish Literature |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Readers who want to understand Beckett's development—*Watt* sits between his earlier conventional fiction and the trilogy, and illuminates both. |
Mr. Knott’s House
Watt arrives at the house of Mr. Knott—a large, complex, imperfectly understood establishment—to serve as a domestic. The arrangement is that servants come and go (one departs as another arrives; one moves from the ground floor to the first floor as another takes the ground floor position), and Mr. Knott himself is at the center of this arrangement, rarely seen, never clearly described, possibly the same from day to day, possibly entirely different.
Watt’s project is to understand what is happening. He brings to this project a philosophical rigor that is both his defining characteristic and his essential comedy: he does not simply observe but catalogues, permutes, systematically eliminates possibilities, and arrives at statements of such careful qualification that they barely make claims at all. When a dog comes to eat Mr. Knott’s leftover food, Watt does not merely note the fact—he traces the entire system by which the dog is maintained, the families involved, the arrangement between households, until the initial fact has been embedded in a structure of such elaborate precision that it has effectively vanished.
Mr. Knott himself is the novel’s central absence. He appears infrequently, does not speak clearly, has a presence in the house that is more like a condition than a person. He may change entirely from day to day, or he may always be the same—Watt’s observations cannot settle the question because Watt’s observations are never quite adequate to what is actually happening. This is the novel’s fundamental joke and its fundamental philosophical point: the more carefully you look, the less you see.
The Comedy of Exhaustion
Beckett’s technique in Watt is the systematic enumeration of possibilities. When considering how Watt might have learned that he was to proceed to Mr. Knott’s house, the novel enumerates every possible means of such learning—by word of mouth, by letter, by observing a sign, by overhearing a conversation—and qualifies each possibility to the point of dissolution. When considering what might have happened when Watt knocked on a door, the novel generates every possible combination of actions by every possible combination of people who might or might not have been behind the door.
The comedy of this technique is genuine and cumulative. The reader’s oscillation between laughter and exhaustion mirrors Watt’s own oscillation between the compulsion to understand and the recognition that understanding is not forthcoming. What Beckett is doing is rendering consciousness as it actually operates—not as a smooth, selective process that takes in only relevant information, but as a relentless machine that cannot not process, that generates permutations without being able to stop, that arrives at no conclusion because conclusion is not available.
The addenda at the novel’s end—fragments Beckett could not integrate into the main text—include the note “no symbols where none intended,” which is both Beckett’s genuine instruction and his characteristic joke. Watt is as full of symbols as any text in the canon; the instruction not to read them as symbols is itself a symbol.
Before the Trilogy
Beckett wrote Watt between 1942 and 1944, hiding from the German Occupation in the village of Roussillon in the south of France—a period of profound displacement and danger that produced, paradoxically, his most comic and most technically productive novel. He wrote in English (his first language, though French would become his primary literary language after the war), and the novel was not published until 1953, the same year as Waiting for Godot.
Watt is the bridge between Beckett’s earlier, relatively conventional fiction (Murphy, More Pricks Than Kicks) and the great trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) that followed. The machinery of exhaustive enumeration, the philosophical comedy of knowing that cannot know, the dissolution of the reliable narrator—all of these are worked out in Watt and deployed with increasing intensity in the trilogy. Reading Watt before the trilogy reveals the precise nature of Beckett’s project; reading it after the trilogy reveals how much he was already capable of doing in 1944. The Nobel Prize in 1969 recognized the full arc of an achievement that begins here.
Our rating: 4.0/5 — Beckett’s funniest and most philosophically foundational novel. Essential for understanding how the trilogy came to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Watt" about?
Watt arrives at the house of Mr. Knott to serve as his domestic. He observes everything with extreme precision and cannot understand any of it. When his service ends, he moves to an asylum and dictates the story to a man named Sam. Beckett's most comic novel—and the one in which he worked out the machinery he would use for the rest of his career.
Who should read "Watt"?
Readers who want to understand Beckett's development—*Watt* sits between his earlier conventional fiction and the trilogy, and illuminates both.
What are the key takeaways from "Watt"?
The compulsion to understand everything is both comic and constitutive of human consciousness Understanding is not available—but this does not make the attempt to understand less necessary Exhaustive enumeration of possibilities does not constitute knowledge of what actually happened Language that tries to be completely precise eventually undermines its own precision The domestic and the philosophical are, in Beckett's hands, the same territory
Is "Watt" worth reading?
Watt is Beckett at his most exhaustingly comic: the novel's humor comes from Watt's compulsive attempt to account for everything that happens, including the infinite permutations of everything that might happen but didn't—and the reader's growing awareness that this is what consciousness is like.
Ready to Read Watt?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: