Beckett’s piece reminds me of one of those tropes in old cartoons, something like the Flintstones. Running gag would be that the characters were walking on some rolling conveyor belt and a revolving background would be on a conveyor belt behind them. They would walk and walk, never getting anywhere, while the background would show the same features, rocks and trees, over and over again. Then Becket takes that scene and puts another conveyor belt over the first scene and has it going up and down. They criss-cross and create a flashing pattern, causing the reader, and the narrator, to swerve their head around like a kid with ADHD. The only way for the narrator and reader, as they are in the same boat, to cope with this is to focus on one thing and hold it for as long as they can.
The narrator and the reader have an interesting relationship as it’s like the narrator is in the reader’s mind, visualizing the same thing. He corrects the reader first one way, and then the other, making sure the reader has an accurate representation of the events in the story, such as in the line “The top, very flat, of a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild, so wild, enough.” The narrator directs the reader’s imagination and visualization of the story, giving him or her a hand to hold between all the sudden scene and image and idea shifts in the piece.
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