On 18 October 1932, the young Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote a letter to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy, drawing a distinction between conscious, agential events, and reflex actions. The tension between the conscious, agential subject, and automatic bodily events comes to constitute a key concern in Beckett’s writing, which dedicates meticulous attention to those bodily functions that fall between intentional and non-intentional acts, such as sexual reflexes, breathing, habitual actions, and even, at times, the production of speech itself. In staging this tension, Beckett is in search of a literary form to accommodate an emerging understanding of the self that has its origins in a finding of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century neurology: the discovery of the autonomous nervous system as independent or near-independent from the conscious, intentional subject.