Beckett’s conflicted Irish identity centered around the figures of mother, Mother Ireland and “mother Anglo-Irish”. Refusing Yeats’s Anglo-Irish legacy, he chose the first major Irish-Catholic writer as a model instead. From Joyce came the “itch to write”, but one inhibited by Beckett's fear that he had “nothing to say”. The vision of a series of “brotherly likes” generating only the same seemed to condemn his project, shared with Joyce, of developing a language that was no one’s mother tongue to repeating Finnegans Wake’s exploitation of the lexicon’s productive categories. Ultimately rejecting Joyce’s solution, he instead extracted tattered syntaxes from the closed-class grammatical categories, creating a new Dante-inspired literary language whose matter acknowledged change, recognizing some things did not return, had no likes, were less.