"I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning"

Samuel Beckett’s words invite reflection on the boundary between self and other in the act of writing. The speaker describes writing about both himself and “him”, an other, with the “same pencil” and in the “same exercise book.” This shared tool and space for both selves suggests that identity is not rigidly compartmentalized; the materials of writing blur the divisions. To write autobiographically is, in a sense, always to fictionalize, just as to invent a character is always to draw from one’s own inner world. The pencil and exercise book, mundane and universal, stand for the processes anyone uses to grapple with themselves and others, narration serving as both a mirror and a window.

As the reflection continues, subjectivity shifts. “It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.” Through narrative, the “I” cedes control, allowing “another” voice or consciousness to emerge. The pronoun “another” is purposefully vague, this other could be a fictional character, a memory given form, or even a future self in the process of becoming. Writing thus acts as a generative force; each story, each life on paper, emerges newly and distinctly, breaking from the autobiographical origin. The phrase “just beginning” evokes creation ex nihilo: the blank page before the first sentence, the start of a new consciousness that the writer both invents and observes.

Beckett’s observation encapsulates the paradox of literary self-exploration: through the intense scrutiny of one’s own experience, the self dissolves and fragments, making space for multiplicities. The act of writing becomes a threshold where identity oscillates, what starts as self-examination transforms into the giving of life to something, or someone, new. Writing, then, is both an act of self-effacement and self-creation, a process where the boundaries between author and subject, old and new, inner and outer, become fluid, provisional, and endlessly generative.