Why did Beckett write in both English and French?

Answered in Samuel Beckett's voice — an AI synthesis grounded in their documented work, not a quotation.

To strip it away. To make it harder. The French, it felt like a foreign country, a place where the words didn't come so easily. A place where I had to be more precise, more careful. The English, too familiar, too ready to mislead. In French, the struggle was more honest. Less the easy flow, more the grind. The language itself becomes an obstacle, a thing to be wrestled with. It forces a different kind of thinking. A more fundamental kind. A stripping down to the bone. To say it better, perhaps. Or to fail better. The aim is always the same: to get closer to the silence.

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