The appearances of the Galls, their conversations and their gestures do not leave any impression on Watt who used to live among face values and now lives without values. In other words, the world of the Galls could never be translated into signs of meanings through the cognitive filter of Watt because he hasn't any. The clockwise life style in Knott's house has already trained Watt to be one who does not know and does not care to know what's happening around him. The essence of reality Beckett interprets as the encounter between a pure subject and pure objects in Proust is replaced in this novel by the mechanical formulation of the action "happening" itself. Watt, together with his fellow servants, cannot accept the facts that a "nothing" has happened around them "with all the clarity and solidity of something" and that this "nothing" revisits him "in such a way that he was forced to submit to it all over again" (Beckett, Watt 73). The tension between the full play of sense and reason to comply with the mechanic life on one side and the insensible and unintellectual nature of the clock mechanism on the other makes it difficult for the servants to accommodate readily to the living rules in Knott's house.
Yet the mathematic systems of the dog-raising and the Lynch family Watt establishes, in imagination or in reality, are the best proof of Watt's ability to adapt to the mode of life of a clock hand. All the possibilities of the development of the systems, free from the imposed interpretation, are considered and listed in a way abstract numbers in algebra are displayed. The coming and going of dogs are strictly scheduled according to a timing which corresponds to that of a clock. The circular movement of the dogs supposed by Watt, to match with his own movement, will never come to an end once the same mechanism is applied to the genealogical multiplication of the Lynch family which is supposed to raise the dogs and thus works as the engine of the clock machine. The succession of generations of the Lynch family, except for the variation in naming, imitates the homogeneous counting of minutes or hours. "Five generations, twenty-eight souls, nine hundred and eighty years, such was the proud record of the Lynch family, when Watt entered Mr. Knott's service." (Beckett, Watt 101) No doubt the pride will be handed over to the next servant in succession, no matter Watt is or is not in Knott's house. It's the clockwise movement that secures the continuity of time in Knott's house. There are changes, however, in this self-justified inner system of clock time. Birth and death, which interrupt the succession of the family members, prove to be the heterogeneous factors among the homogeneous numbers. But the changes could take place in a regular way and are not changing in themselves. As Watt observes, "till changing changing in twenty over twenty-eight equals five over seven times twelve equals sixty over seven equals eight months and a half approximately, if none died, if none were born, a thousand years" (Beckett, Watt 101). Therefore, the changing at last fits in with the monotonous movement as well.
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