The title is derived from the Latin phrase "disjecta membra", meaning scattered remains or fragments, usually applied to written work.
[1] The collection includes Beckett's famous essay on an early version of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake which originally appeared in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.
The play dramatized some episodes from the life of Samuel Johnson and takes its title from his long poem The Vanity of Human Wishes.
[2] The fragment was slightly annotated for the Disjecta collection, noting that Beckett produced a "fair copy" of the notebook material.
Critic Harold Bloom writes in his essay on Beckett in The Western Canon that the fragment, particular the characters' reactions to Leavett's entrance offer the first glimpses of Beckett's much later masterpieces Endgame and Waiting for Godot.