"Ping" is a

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the old ...

written by

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...

in French (originally "Bing") in 1966. Beckett later translated it into English and published it in 1967. The French version was set to music by the composer

Jean-Yves Bosseur Jean-Yves Bosseur (born in Paris, 5 February 1947) is a French composer and writer. Bosseur studied composition with Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Cologne Courses for New Music, from 1965 to 1968, at the ...

with Beckett's help in 1981 and redone in 2001. David Lodge has described "Ping" as: "the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life."Lodge, David. "Some Ping Understood" ''Encounter'', February 1968. Pages 85-89. "Ping" is a very compact short story punctuated only by periods. The story is barely two pages but is usually presented in a justified alignment to heighten the feeling of

claustrophobia Claustrophobia is a fear of confined spaces. It is triggered by many situations or stimuli, including elevators, especially when crowded to capacity, windowless rooms, and hotel rooms with closed doors and sealed windows. Even bedrooms with a l ...

. As noted by Dan O'Hara,

"The density of ''Ping'''s prose style is its most immediate and most intriguing aspect; it seems condensed or undiluted. Like César's compressed sculptures of crushed cars, all the constituent elements are squashed into an uncomfortable proximity ..In ''Ping'', all the spaces between, the gaps, have been forced out; no air flows around the words. Read aloud, ''Ping'' enacts this
asphyxia Asphyxia or asphyxiation is a condition of deficient supply of oxygen to the body which arises from abnormal breathing. Asphyxia causes generalized hypoxia, which affects all the tissues and organs, some more rapidly than others. There are m ...
."

Interpretations

The interpretation of "Ping" has been heavily debated since its publication. Interpretations have ranged from

Jesus Christ Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...

in the tomb to a person in a hospital bed post-surgery to "the first act of creation". The story is basic and repetitive, allowing a range of possibilities, but the standard interpretation is that "Ping" covers the last moments of a person's life. Additional discussion focused on the interpretation of the

onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia (or rarely echoism) is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetics, phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as Oin ...

''ping'' scattered throughout the story. The ''pings'' could mark the character's shifting mindset from optimism to despair. O'Hara speculated that the use of ''ping'', a specifically metallic onomatopoeia, may refer to Beckett's medical history. Beckett was hospitalized in 1964 and 1965. He was then diagnosed with double cataracts in 1966 and a number of people in his life either died or became ill. O'Hara hypothesized that the ''pings'' were the sounds of an electrocardiograph machine.

Notes

External links

* English version {{Beckett-prose 1966 short stories Short stories by Samuel Beckett