Associations

As Macbeth is associated with the weird sisters, Hamlet with the ghost, Othello with the handkerchief and King Lears with his daughters, Beckett is associated with bicycles dust-bins through some of his people (the word he preferred when he referred to his characters): Molloy and Hamm. To confirm and celebrate and even to become part of this association with Beckett's bicycles, Hugh Kenner, in the introduction to his 1961 book on Beckett, gives an account of his first visit to Beckett in Paris and how he discussed with Beckett the dust-bins in "Endgame" and Molloy's bicycle. When leaving Beckett's Paris villa, he went wrongly through the back yard where he saw a dust-bin and stumbled over a bicycle placed in the entrance