Humour in the Unnameable - Paper Topic

I have spent the past week or so trying to figure out how I will be dissecting “The Unnamable” in order to find the humour Beckett placed throughout. I am not completely sure what direction I want to take this paper in, but I have been reading Freud’s interpretation of humour since Beckett was largely influenced by him.

 In Freud’s “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” he looks at how nonsense is used to convey humour. Freud believes this is executed through forms of parody, exaggeration, caricature and travesty. Before I found more humour in the stupidity of the characters, but stupidity means thinking too little whereas nonsense is thinking too much. The jar in the head is humourous through his exaggeration of the story progressing around him/her. I greatly enjoy this style of humour since it comes from human reasoning/comprehension.  Everyone has had a rough day and looked back upon it later finding the circumstances funny. One might think there could be no humour in such a tragic setting, but don’t we find ourselves laughing when someone walks into a screen door? Comedy most certainly exists in human pain especially when it is a pain we have experiences before and have come to terms with. 

I wanted to write this paper because I found “The Unnamable” to be funny, yet I was unaware how it invoked my funny bone. I have reread the novel again and wish to read it one or two more times since there were plenty of things I overlooked in my first reading and surely the second as well. I want my next reading to be done once I look more into Freud and other theories regarding how we perceive humour.  I do want a good portion of my paper to be looking at “The Unnamable” from a Freudian perspective, but I also wish to see how irony and other forms of humour are incorporated in the novel. I have just begun reading Jennifer Jeffer’s “Beyond Irony: The Unnamable’s Appropriations of its Critics in a Humorous Reading of the Text” which looks at the novel’s irony through a Romantic and Humanist viewpoint.