Adam Piette, Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said: Reading the Subject, Subject to Reading:

The article reads Beckets novel through the lens of roughly contemporary French reader response

theories of reading, notably the work of Michel Picard and Michel Jouve. Picards La Lecture comme

jeu divides the reader into three, liseur, lectant and lu, whilst Jouves L'Effet-personnage dans le

roman adds the lisant to the mix. The effect of applying these reader formations to Beckets novel is to

discover the consciously broken and divided nature of character in the novel, which I theorize as a

conflict between embedded and encoded forms of readerly (and spectral/textual) identities, the reader-

as-body, the child reader, the reader-as-scholar, and the unconscious reader. These four readerly

practices posit the subject of the reading (the old so dying woman of Becketts novel) as a figure for

the imagination, but her representation is shown as resisting representation, resisting the four-fold

staged reading of her as trope.