Space, migrancy, and liminality in Beckett’s <i>Stories and Texts for Nothing</i>

This article focuses on the representation of space in Samuel Beckett’s post-WWII short fiction, particularly the collection Stories and Texts for Nothing (1955). Through close reading of these texts, I argue that Beckett’s prose offers a poetics of in-betweenness that challenges notions of self and space. Placing these texts in conversation with the culture of exile and migrancy in mid-century Europe, I borrow from the field of literary border studies to show how Beckett’s narrators function as border beings who cross liminal spaces and refuse confinement. The article also explores how these characters subvert sovereign structures through forms of border-crossing that suspend ontological and spatial closure. While prior scholarship has mainly addressed the existential, abstract or posthuman dimensions of space in Beckett, I reread his postwar prose in relation to border aesthetics and bring into focus the political stakes of sovereignty and unbelonging.