Company (novella)

Company illustrates the dilemma of the modern 20th century human, an existential crisis in which "God is dead" and life's purpose seems entirely arbitrary.

In terms of the prose, Beckett had a crisis in which he realised he could not mimic James Joyce, whose tendency was—like Rabelais and even the later stream-of-consciousness writers—to add and expound and thus emphatically impose his vision on the reader.

Beckett decided instead to subtract, to make his prose simple, monolithic and bare, until the sentences resemble aphorisms or existential nostrums.

There is some stylistic resemblance to J. P. Donleavy's work The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966) in the short sentences and the general eschewing of punctuation such as commas and question marks.

There is also a significant amount of references to the account of Genesis: one critic describes Company as "Beckett's own creation myth".