Beckett's "one Evening": An Anthropomorphic Still Life

This article is a close reading of Beckett's "One Evening," a text that is rarely analysed in the growing scholarship on Beckett. The reading examines the foregrounding of the telling, at the expense of plot development, and the narrator's predilection for the aural and poetical features of language. Thematically the text is replete with images of mortality, which causes the figure of the woman to be ambivalent about the event of sunset and the narrator to be troubled by ending. It is argued that "One Evening" essentially results in a liminal anthropomorphic still life that struggles to be still.