Deconstructive Study of Man’s Deplorable Status in the Panoptical Society of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy

Abstract

As an elegant writer of early post-modernism, Samuel Beckett's works strongly question regularities and intentionally oppose traditions. They violently disturb all the settled notions, metaphysical conventions and doctrines of structuralism. Concerning all these issues in Beckett’s Molloy, this study makes intellectual use of Michel Foucault’s viewpoints of power, knowledge, self-restraint and panopticon. It says that human requires a non-functionalist society whose arrangements, whatever they are, serves no larger purpose and has no redeeming social value. For researcher, the kind of radical society which is motivated by prejudice of the power has nothing but servitude, injustice, family disintegration and religious skepticism.
Key words: Deconstruction; Panopticon; Surveillance; Skepticism