Neighbours: For Seamus Heaney

After Beckett: The Influence of Samuel Beckett on the Fiction of J. G. Farrell

“…5 "Back in his quiet room," Greacen tells us, "Jim was haunted by Beckett's lines, which he knew almost by heart." 6 Although the influence of Beckett's pessimistic late modernism is, in hindsight, clearly evident in Farrell's first novel The Man From Elsewhere (1963), the first reviewer to bring Samuel Beckett into Farrell criticism was Bernard Share, the founding editor of Books Ireland, in his Irish Times review of Farrell's second novel, The Lung (1965). Share does not suggest a straightforward influence, but nevertheless makes the connection for the first time: "Farrell forestalls any easy comparison with Beckett or other chroniclers of the self-obsessed."…”