Raymond Federman, Dying with Beckett

Raymond Federman (1928–2009), known as a Beckett scholar, postmodern theorist and avant-garde novelist, was singularly devoted to the one he called Sam. Having escaped death, deportation in the Holocaust, his fiction recounts his experiences from the day of his “birth into death,” the 16th of July 1942. Writing what he called surfiction, fiction which exposes the fictionality of reality, Federman fashioned himself as a Beckett creature. This article outlines aspects of his devotion and its links to death and dying, starting with how he used Beckett’s words to confront his terminal illness.