Samuel Beckett’s prose “The Lost Ones” begins with the word “abode” and the text’s content is exactly that. The description of a cylindrical structure which is the dwelling of about 200 bodies. A study on a sequence of fictions proves that this isn’t the only case. Most of Beckett’s fictions are evolving around spaces that are –or will be- some kind of refuge for the protagonist of each story.
Rooms in asylums or ordinary houses, caves, derelict sheds, ditches, structures with geometrical shapes, spaces more or less isolated, with or without realistic features, are used as temporary or permanent habitations. The continual quest for them, the movement from and towards them and the way of their habitation,are themes that cover a big part [if not the biggest] of the fiction.
The texts that follow were used in this study: “First love”, “The expelled”, “The calmative”, “The end”, “Molloy”, “Malone dies”, “The unnamable”, “How it is”, “Imagination dead imagine”, “Lost ones”, “Bing”, “Lessness”. Those texts give a sufficient helpful sample of how space is being used in Beckett’s fiction.
The purpose of this research is to manage a walk through those texts, inside their given refuges and outside of them also, more like an observation than like an interpretation.
