What this book will hopefully contribute to the general canon of theatrical studies is its study of the Beckettian dramatic text not as a model of the 'absurd' tradition, but rather as a cultural product whose writer's thinking can scarcely be dissociated from the cultural environment within which it took shape, and whose deciphering requires the use of cultural codes and sub-codes that will undergo detailed examination in the course of analysis, a study that we may so generically call a cultural semiotic study of Beckett.