Like much of Beckett’s work, “Watt” is funny and bleak and also uncompromising in its indifference to such readerly comforts as plot and accessibility. The novel follows its title character as he goes to work as a domestic servant in the home of Mr. Knott. Combine “Watt” and “Knott” and you get “whatnot,” and for some readers, assuredly, “Watt” will never be more than that: two hundred and fifty pages of mannered prose, showy vocabulary (“ataraxy,” “conglutination,” “exiguity”), syllogisms, lists, and Gertrude Stein-like repetitions and variations.
But Beckett’s stylistic extravagance has a purpose: it illustrates the desperate lengths people can be pushed to by powers that behave arbitrarily, indifferent to human suffering. Watt is helplessly, pedantically logical—a kind of dimwitted Mr. Spock. To the contemporary reader he displays more than a few autistic traits, including a love of routine and repetition, and difficulty relating to others on an emotional level. His sanity is also in question. We are told early in the novel that Watt hears voices, “singing, crying, stating, murmuring things unintelligible in his ear.”