"The result of this was that Watt never knew how he got into Mr. Knott's house. He knew that he got in by the back door, but he was never to know, never, never to know how the backdoor came to be opened. And if the backdoor had never been opened, but had remained shut, then who knows Watt had never got into Mr. Knott's house as all, but turned away, and returned to the station, and caught the first train back to town. Unless he had got in through a window" (Beckett 37).
This passage comes after two laborious paragraphs contemplating how the back door (locked when Watt first tried to enter, but then unlocked when he tried a second time, after finding the front door locked) could have either been unlocked the whole time or potentially unlocked by someone between checking the two doors.
I bring up this passage because I think it demonstrates, on a small scale, some of the ideas of deconstruction. Having endlessly meditated on how the door could have opened for him, Beckett sets up a binary situation (Enter Mr. Knott's house through the door/Go back) and then, with one final sentence, dispels the binary opposition entirely, making Watt's contemplation of the door seem almost entirely meaningless. Watt's contemplation of the door seems central to some grander scheme of ideas: he had to have gotten in somehow or would have been barred. A door left unlocked carries just as much metaphorical weight as a door stealthily unlocked between tries. The narrator plays along with this idea, implying that one of the central pillars of the story--Watt's arrival at Mr. Knott's house--might have been forgone entirely and a new set of events would have resulted. Instead, with one passive, fragmented sentence, the reader is opened to a humorously obvious third (among countless many) options.
As for the specifics of language, there are numerous instances where he seems either to directly or indirectly play with the subjectivity of language. Sometimes, it is at the expense of the reader: "Before leaving he made the following short statement" (39). This is how he opens what ends up being a 20-page rant by Arsene, the head servant who is leaving as Watt arrives. (For a brief (perhaps phonocentric) sample, about 1 1/2-2 pages somewhere in the first half, I've found a really good dramatic reading excerpt). The point being is that he is playing with the very subjective nature of a word like "short." In the very context of Arsene's rambling in that excerpt, it's clearly much shorter than the passage of time he describes and yet there is an expectation by many readers than when they read "short" it will presumably be far less than what they are given.
Throughout his speech (indicated by the last few lines of the video) he is constantly attempting to get back on track with constant asides of "now where was I?" and "but that's another matter." Yet his nebulous speech becomes a kind of act unto itself. He constant asks if he is being clear or if Watt "understands what he means." There is a kind of uncertainty that comes with articulating himself:
"Where was I? The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing. Gliss
— iss — iss — STOP! I trust that I make myself clear" (42-43).
There seems, on Arsene's part, a failure to find a word to describe himself, but presumes Watt can intuit his meaning.
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