The event and its figuration in the literary text may shed light on the relation of the work to its context, not in terms of content so much as in terms of its properly literary configuration. In event is not (always) erased but parodied, displaced, erased or estimated; it obsesses a narrator who is the fallible memorialist or inventor of a story – his own – which escapes him. This narrator, concerned with determining what could have or should havebeen, also appears as an observer exploring a new form of speech, one engaged in a dialogue slanted again the literary discourse of Beckett's time, the discourse of post–World War II novels, where the hero discovers himself in a need of adventure or action–taking, the discourse as well of the personal testimony of historical catastrophe.