True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness.

If Company —with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprecedented unguardedness within the Beckett canon, then a special case may be made for its sincerity: that it resides in the novella's very gambits, decoys and "true feints." To arrive at such sincerity, Beckett may be read as the modernist novelist of voice—of a confessional voice that exposes its speaker without the buffetings character, plot, or self-dramatization. Such deprivations are, paradoxically, the product of a poetics of interiority and the practice of exagoreusis, a confessional mode in which a penitent verbalizes his thoughts without recourse to thematizing arrangement. Company 's sincere loneliness is therefore not found in any "congruence between avowal and actual feeling," as Lionel Trilling's seminal definition goes. Rather, it emerges as something inferential: that which remains when the impossibility of company is subtracted from a desire for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]