Olga: You used to love me. You used to work. You used to have a joke with your father. You used to travel. You… Victor: It was bluff.1 Unavailable to the reading public until the mid 1990s, Eleutheria displays the essentially contradictory relationship between the Western humanist identity, which is tagged by the terms self, situation, furniture, and the effected collapse of that identity in the state of Victor Krap. He, as heir to the bourgeois, is supposed to perpetuate its character. The fact that he does not do so exposes the bourgeois’ invested expectation of continuity, along with the emptiness of the continuity it is supposed to maintain. Much has been written on the reasons why Beckett didn’t want the play published or staged after 1948 and its then rejection.2 But whether or not the reason was its too-plain exposition of the basic theme that all his previous and subsequent works were to more subtly animate, the helpfulness of such a case-note as this play is undeniable. Where the mythic constant is often ‘subcutaneous’ or systemic in Beckett’s work, here for once it is graphically plain.