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In many ways, Samuel Beckett's prose fiction is an interrogation of the means by which metaphysics, characterised as the attempt to explain and understand the world through the power of thought, leads to the formulation (and subsequent collapse) of systematic theories and belief systems. Although such systems can be roughly categorised as being either rational or mystical in character, all are fundamentally reliant on the forging of abstract links between modes of thought previously seen as unconnected. This is a process predicated on the logic of analogy. Yet in Beckett's work, particularly in such early novels as Murphy and Watt, it is precisely this kind of cognitive association, allowed to operate unchecked, which proves to be the major impediment to his characters' efforts to comprehend their worlds. This thesis is a chronological exploration of the manner in which Beckett's fiction simultaneously portrays and scrutinizes the complex ways that rational (and therefore scientific) modes of thought are profoundly reliant on the ostensibly 'flimsy' logic of analogy in its many forms, thereby serving as a testing ground for the polnts at which this process breaks down and the attraction of the 'neatness of identifications' (as Beckett warned against in his 1929 essay 'Dante ... Bruno.Vico ..Joyce') is allowed to take precedence over the search for a more truthful account of the object of enquiry. Following the refutation of philosophical systems through their methodological affirmation in the early fiction, the allusive and structural patterns present in Beckett's post-war fiction serve as a repudiation of the commonly held view of Beckett as an overtly anti-rationalist writer. After this, the late prose operates by reducing the objects of its hermetic spaces to metonymic archetypes, mirroring the construction of scientific models in which only those entities which are strictly relevant to the theory, or conducive to its explanatory power, are represented.

Emmanuel Bove wrote some thirty novels and short stories between 1924 and 1945. His writing represented a challenge to the 'Belles lettres ', and was celebrated by Max Jacob and Rainer-Maria Rilke, praised by Samuel Beckett and rediscovered by Peter Handke. His work describes a disintegrating society using the perspective of a central character whose experience of the day-to-day is of a hostile world, be it in a family environment or a country at war, that causes physical and mental illness. Bove's work anticipates the Absurd and Existentialist literature, and its expression of ennui is an aspect of its modernity. Previous studies of Bove's work have analysed its aesthetic qualities and its narrative structures, and compared it with the Nouveau Roman, the literature of the Absurd and Existentialism, Russian novels of the nineteenth century and English!American writing of the first half of the twentieth century. In this study, fiction is shown to be a social and psychological archive, representing the rejection and alienation of the subject, his material deprivation and mental suffering. Despair is emphasised as a constant in the threatening experience that is everyday life. The importance of the family and of socio-historical influences on the subject's condition is discussed. The study examines the possibility of redemption by writing, and analyses how the texts give expression to artistic creation as a positive response to the negative experience of the everyday. The thesis claims that Bove's work is an exploration of the human psyche, its experience of trauma and its responses. It analyses the representation of suffering and the causes of the destruction of the individual. The theoretical support for the interpretation of the texts is drawn mainly from the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical theory underpins also the interpretation of references in the text to artistic creation that is indicated as one of the possible responses to suffering. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part One gives an introduction to Bove's life and work (Chapter I); it places Bove's writings in the literary historical context of the development of novel writing from Dostolevski to the Nouveau Roman (Chapter 2), and discusses the approach of previous critics to Bove's work (Chapter 3). Part Two presents an analysis of the expression given to the despair and destruction of the subject and to the compensatory, therapeutic value of creative writing. Chapter 4 focuses on the mind and Chapter 5 on the body.

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