His characters are buried in sand or up to their necks in urns, they are disembodied voices or they crawl through mud in a kind of limbo. He has written, as the critic A Alvarez once put it, "plays without actors, acts without words, and novels without plot or punctuation".
Samuel Beckett once thanked heaven that he was not a critic who had to write a book about Beckett. Whatever he detected in his own work to suggest it as uninviting to such scrutiny, he has since become one of the most closely examined writers of the 20th century. He is, after his idol Joyce, probably the most famous, and influential, of Irish authors and, despite his reclusive nature, the subject of mounds of biographical detail and commentary. As today's Irish Times supplement illustrates, his reputation and the appeal of his writing have increased, rather than diminished, since his death in 1989.
The kind of centenary celebration planned for his native city - a festival of plays, seminars, talks, films and exhibitions - seemed hardly likely when the future Nobel Prize winner left Dublin for Paris, when he struggled to find publishers for his early prose and audiences for his plays, and his novice writing sunk without trace.
In his plays and texts he cuts close to the bone of the human condition, expressing fundamental truths about what he himself once called "the awful mess of life". While his perspective on our existence has been classified as gloomy and despairing - he was, after all, the author whose eponymous protagonist Murphy uttered the cry: "For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse" - there is comedy in abundance, as well as tenderness and human warmth. There are, too, lessons in the importance of stoical courage and the necessity to struggle on in the face of adversity: his roles, first as a member of the resistance in occupied France and later among the war-wounded in the Irish hospital at Saint-Lô, were testimonies to personal courage and compassion.
With equal courage, he spent his literary life working on his own rigorous terms, paring down language to its most elusive, essential and sombre details. With his masterpiece Waiting for Godot, Beckett not only subverted the conventions of the stage, he also created a theatrical classic worthy of a place alongside Shakespeare.
The great Beckettian actress Billie Whitelaw once said: "There is nothing to understand in Beckett beyond what you see or feel. If you come out of the theatre not having felt anything then you can't understand." Over the coming weeks, audiences will have ample opportunity to see and feel this writer's extraordinary expressions of the human spirit - his "stain upon the silence".