Robin Kirkpatrick mentions the profound influence of Dante on Samuel Beckett
From Robin Kirkpatrick's Introduction to Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy:
'Beckett died with a copy of the ‘Commedia’ at his bedside. Throughout his writing career he had taken, as his own alter ego, the character of the indolent Belacqua who appears in ‘Purgatorio 4’. Above all, Beckett’s concern with ‘waiting’ as a condition of human existence exactly mirrors a dominant theme of the early ‘Purgatorio’. Resisting the dualistic claims of Cartesian thought, Beckett looks, as Dante always does, at the incalculable shifts of word and physical movement that, in the experience of waiting, so vividly animate even the most indolent mind. Here, like Dante, he reclaims the body as a comic determinant of human identity.'
