The aim of Eric P. Levy's book is to usher readers of Beckett to a higher understanding and appreciation of what is unique about Beckett's representations of the human experience. He maintains that diligent reading of the Beckett corpus, alongside key texts in the history of Western thought reveals that Beckett was intensely concerned with representing certain ""constitutive principles"" of the human condition and that the human condition Beckett saw and represented was one founded on principles of doubt, negation, unknowing, and unverifiable being. One of the book's major contributions to Beckett studies is its exhaustive engagement with mainstream Continental philosophy - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant - to name a few.