J. M. Coetzee: Samuel Beckett, the short fiction

Though, it is not a description he would
have accepted, Beckett can justly be called a philosophical
writer, one whose works can be read as a
series of sustained sceptical raids on Descartes
and the philosophy of the subject that Descartes founded.
In his suspicion of Cartesian axiomatics Beckett aligns himself
with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and with his younger
contemporary Jacques Derrida. The satiric interrogation to
which he subjects the Cartesian cogito (I am thinking,
therefore I must exist) is so close in spirit to Derrida's
programme for exposing the metaphysical assumptions
behind Western thought that we must speak, if not of
Beckett's direct influence on Derrida, then of a striking case of
sympathetic vibration.