Memory and/as Identity

Abstract Samuel Beckett’s interest in the question of memory reaches its full-fledged dramatic articulation in his later plays Krapp’s Last Tape and That Time where he characterises memory not only as a mental faculty of retention and reproduction of images but also as a criterion of identity by which his characters realise that they are a persistently coherent self. From a Ricoeurean perspective, this article demonstrates how remembering in the form of narratives sustains the passage from a private consciousness to a relational identity by rendering the self a “storied self” in the plays in question.