On 12 August 1948, Samuel Beckett wrote to his friend, the art critic Georges Duthuit, wondering where he might find ‘the terms, the rhythms’ necessary to go on writing. Beckett informs Duthuit that while out walking that evening ‘among the dripping bracken’ he had decided

These somewhat cryptic remarks occur in the context of a discussion between Beckett and Duthuit about the state of contemporary art, which developed into a sequence of published conversations entitled Three Dialogues (1949). In it, Beckett speaks of an art that has turned away from existing forms of expression in order to confront its overwhelming sense of helplessness and failure – an art that is ‘weary of pretending to be able, of being able … of going a little further along a dreary road’ (PTD 103). Here too, the emphasis is on ‘the impossibility of ever being wrong enough’ or ‘defenceless enough’, and yet there is also something faintly hopeful in the author's account of a post-war subject who, having been reduced to a frail and shell-less creature, senses some small prospect of new life stirring beneath ‘an unforgettable sky’. Creative expression, Beckett seems to be suggesting, is now to be sought on the threshold of being – between the ‘glory of having been a little’, and ‘the temptation still to be, a little’ – where life, having reached the verge of extinction, seems somehow to persist at this low level.

In his reading of Endgame (1957), Adorno likens Beckett's ‘figures’ (he hesitates to call them characters) to ‘flies that twitch after the swatter has half smashed them’, arguing that the text exemplifies the sense of collapse exhibited by post-Holocaust art: