In this chapter I map out a trajectory that I see emerging in the fiction from All Strange Away (1963–4) to Lessness (1969). My task here will be to analyse the relation between being and space in what Beckett himself referred to as the ‘closed space’ fictions: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ping (1966), The Lost Ones (1966, 1970). I begin with All Strange Away as the text which sets out the parameters of the closed space fiction: here we are given precise dimensions of the space a subject either inhabits or into which he projects his memories; as the text unfolds, the subject's space is reduced (from five foot square and six feet high) to a cube measuring ‘three foot every way’ (CSP 173); the space finally becomes a rotunda supporting a dome ‘as in the Pantheon at Rome or certain beehive tombs’ (CSP 176). My interest here is to think through the relation between these interior spaces and the interiority of the subject: is this text offering a way of thinking about material interior spaces and the (metaphorical) spatiality of the subject? (We speak of ‘interiority’ as a way of referring to the self but perhaps ignore the spatial implications of the word.) As we move to Imagination Dead Imagine, the ‘residual precipitate’ of All Strange Away, we notice that Beckett has refined the image of the subject as interiority: here now the subject is beyond what appears to be all markers of (conventional) life: ‘No trace anywhere of life’ (CSP 182), but the material reality of the space, now mathematically precise, remains. As I move into a discussion of this text, and map its relation to the unfolding of the closed spaces of Ping and The Lost Ones, I will return to questions raised in Texts for Nothing, but here perhaps answer them in a different register: how are we to understand the relation between the perceiving, remembering subject, the subject who appears only as the catastrophic remainder of a past self, and his location within massively reduced and confined spaces, spaces that appear as testimony, perhaps witness, to a seismic shift in the reality of the world, as such?