The book covers Beckett's early fiction, mature fiction, theatre and his spare late prose works, situating Beckett in a philosophical tradition and literary tradition that has argued for the creative value of stupidity; a key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Deleuze, and central to the practice of writers such as Wordsworth, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Joyce. The book investigates the relationship between verbal cliche;, memory and authority in Beckett's prose and drama, arguing that by consciously manipulating the language of cliche;, Beckett can interrogate the assumptions made in the discourses of social and intellectual authority without assuming a superior and complacent authority of his own.