Bringing in other texts: Beckett's A Piece of Monologue

Introduction
English degree modules are, generally speaking, not set books units.  The works discussed in seminars are often only the starting points for your own explorations of the literature.  The classic recipe for a very good student essay is to take concerns raised in lectures and seminars, and to see how they look when set against a text which is different from that for which they were originally intended.  It might be worth working through an example of this process in action, and to discuss ways of expanding concerns raised about one text into the wider canon of the author under discussion.
Samuel Beckett is a good candidate for this process, owing to his agreeable habit of writing very short plays.  Waiting for Godot may seem rather strange and minimalist, but lurking in the Beckett canon are plays beside which it looks positively sumptuous: this exercise is based on one of them.

Instructions
1.  Read Samuel Beckett's A Piece of Monologue, a play written in 1979, 25 years after Waiting for Godot.  The text is in Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986).  

2.  Make notes towards addressing the following questions:
•	Is this like one would normally expect a play to be?  If not, why not?  What do we think of the central character?
•	Any handles on what is going on?  (How long is thirty thousand nights, in years?)  To some extent the setting is clearly deliberately vague, but are there any useful clues in building up a picture of what is happening?  
•	Are there any concerns it seems to have in common with Waiting for Godot?  A few to get one started might include:
•	the interest in memory and forgetting
•	these terrible long sequences of actions necessary to do anything - compare lighting the lamp to the long descriptions of Lucky laying out Pozzo's things in Act I.
•	that first sentence - seeing death as an inevitable consequence of being born - cf. Vladimir's monologue on the nature of life

3.  Try out on this play various of the critical views on Waiting for Godot that we've acquired from lectures and seminars, substituting in A Piece of Monologue in place of Waiting for Godot in each of the following ideas/points of view.
•	"Nothing happens - twice."  (Hmm, not sure this one works well.)
•	"Waiting for Godot is about paring down the theatrical experience to its absolute minimum".  (Is this true of A Piece of Monologue?)
•	"Waiting for Godot is concerned to draw attention to its own theatricality, indeed to its own failure". 
•	"Waiting for Godot is obsessed with death".
•	"Waiting for Godot is obsessed with endlessness, and with the impossibility of ever finishing anything".  (This is quite a good one - can we say "A Piece of Monologue is obsessed with the impossibility of ever finishing anything?"  Any useful quotations at hand?)
•	"Waiting for Godot is bleak and nihilist"/"Waiting for Godot is a life-affirming play about how valuable human love really is".  (Substitute A Piece of Monologue instead.  Can you have the same argument about this piece?  Again, can one list useful quotations from the piece itself?)

4.  Finally, reading this play might give you some fresh ideas for Waiting for Godot.  For instance, here are a couple:
•	A Piece of Monologue is very interested in the sky, and the precise state of the sky.  Looking back at Waiting for Godot, it is striking how often characters go on about the sky: I'm not sure what one can do with this at the moment, but it's interesting.
•	Similarly, A Piece of Monologue is full of obvious imagery of light and dark.  Can one trace anything similar in Waiting for Godot?
•	Are there any sentences here that would make provocative starting-points for essays on Waiting for Godot or the two plays together?  I'm instantly struck by, 
•	"'Light dying. Soon none left to die. No. No such thing as no light': discuss Beckett's imagery of light and darkness".  
•	Or how about, "'Funerals of ... he all but said of loved ones': discuss Beckett's interest in occasions where speech is stifled or breaks down".
You might want to come up with more examples.

Further Work
You might also enjoy:
•	http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/6-4.htm
 - a rather ambitious article on A Piece of Monologue
•	http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/index.html
 - an excellent Beckett site
•	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
 - this Wikipedia entry has an extensive selection of useful links at the bottom.

You could read more Beckett.  The plays Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape are both good places to start, but if shortness is the overriding criterion, try Breath or Eh Joe.  

Every item you add to your knowledge of Beckett increases the range of reference you can make and parallels you can draw.  Whatever playwright you're looking at, it's important to widen your range beyond merely one canonical text.