There are certain similarities between Foucault and Beckett. Foucault described discipline that developed from a personal relationship between subject and sovereign into a system of internalized surveillance. Beckett wrote plays where there was an implied outside observer that controls the characters, even though the setting of the play did not require an outside reality. Foucault described how discourses created truth, while Beckett has characters in his plays and novels that find they need to examine and describe themselves in order to have an existence. In a way, Beckett is the fictionalization of many of Foucault's ideas.