Rockaby Samuel Becker

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Rockaby
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Dublin, Ireland. During the 1930s and 1940s he wrote his first novels and short stories. He wrote a trilogy of novels in the 1950s as well as famous plays like Waiting for Godot. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His later works included poetry and short story collections and novellas. He died on December 22, 1989 in Paris, France.
Summary
 This play is about a woman dressed in an evening gown is sitting in a wooden rocking chair; no other props or scenery are called for. She sits totally still until the very end of the play. The chair apparently starts and stops “rocking of its own accord, since her feet are visible on its footrest. The motion creates a ghostly atmosphere.” The woman (W) is described in the notes as “Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.”
 As she rocks she hears a “dull, expressionless”pre-recorded voice (V) – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s.
 Throughout the play, the woman joins in with the lines “time she stopped”, “living soul” and “rock her off” by demanding “more” each time a little softer than before. 
7
 At the end, the woman fails to join in with the voice, the rocking ceases and the woman’s head slowly indicates “she has apparently died”.
Rockaby
The title of Rockaby plainly alludes to the well-known lullaby Rock-a-bye Baby.
Section I
“The first section details W’s decision to stop going ‘to and fro’ in the outside world in search of ‘another like herself’” evocative of Molloy’s quest to find his mother. The voice’s speech is fragmented and simple “creating an affinity between the language of the child and that of senescence and dying.” This could also be a reason for the “huge eyes”.
The syntax of the Voice's text in Rockaby presents various features that are characteristic of free indirect style, suggesting that it is a sort of stream of consciousness of the protagonist. This is in fact the most plausible interpretation of the text, though one difficulty remains: the words “time she stopped”, “going to and fro”, “all sides” “high and low” that are repeatedly pronounced by the Woman on the rocking chair together with her recorded Voice, contain a third person pronoun which, according to interpretation, refers to the Woman herself. In other terms, the Woman seems to utter a third person pronoun to refer to herself.
Section II
 The second section reprises and therefore emphasizes the decision taken in Section 1. It also marks the “beginning of her next phase of activity – sitting at her upstairs window, searching the windows opposite to see another ‘one living soul … like herself.’
Section III
 In the third section the woman has lowered her standards again. She would be content now to simply see a raised blind as evidence of life. At the end of this section she realises it is “time she stopped” even this activity.
 “A drawn blind and old custom signifying death” and the last thing she does herself before sitting down in the old rocker is “let down the blind” before closing her own eyelids. This decision is first announced in part three by the lines ‘till the day came/in the end came/close of a long day’ reiterated at the opening of part four.
Section IV
 In the final “section V describes W’s relocation downstairs to sit in her mother’s rocking chair where she will wait for death” in exactly the same manner as her mother before her.
 The action on stage becomes concurrent with the narration which becomes a “little softer each time”until the rocking stops completely. She has stopped actively searching for another and given up watching for proof of the existence of another, but through all of this she has always had the voice for company; now she is “done with that”too and has concluded that it is time she herself “was her own other … living soul.”
 The woman selects what initially appears like an unusual outfit for this final scene, an elaborate evening gown. Whether this was the one her mother used when she went through the same steps is unclear; it does however “marks both the uniqueness of the occasion of her retreat to the rocking chair and, as well, her re-enactment of her mother’s action. Whatever her motive in wearing this dress, it constitutes a remnant of an earlier life.