The paper is focused on contact points of different paradigms in the works of Samuel Beckett (1906-989). Using the example of his early experimental prose (Murphy, 1938; Watt, 1944), the paper explores Beckett's problematic position in the context of the modernist project and the transition to postmodernism: the overlapping/fading of modernist optimism (the effort to erase the gap between the language and the objects denominates) and the rise of postmodern scepticism (the fundamental inadequacy of the language.