Samuel Beckett seems to show an interest in nature that is considered by poets and philosophers in the eighteenth century. They sometimes compare the human society with that of ants or bees, and by doing so, try to show the behaviours of mankind in a satirical way.

In Happy Days, finding an ant on her mound, Winnie makes a shrill voice to Willie: “an emmet! a live emmet!” Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets, quotes Alexander Pope saying as follows: “He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hillock, below his serious attention”. Beckett in The Lost Ones represents bodies in the cylinder as “small people”. These bodies climb and descend the ladders, whose steps are sometimes missing. Some enter the quincunxes excavated along the upper wall, others stopping halfway the stairs. Pope in his Essay on Man asserts that mankind should learn from the society of ants and bees “small People’s genius, policies”. Voltaire also compares this earth with a small “fourmilière” (ant-hill, or nest) in Micromégas. Doesn’t the cylinder in The Lost Ones resemble the ant-hill? And don’t the quincunxes seem to be like boxes in the gallery of the inside of these small insects’ abode? Beckett also describes the multitude of the small bodies on the central floor as “pullulement central” (“teeming precinct” in the English version). This representation reminds us of a swarm of ants or bees. Diderot in his Rêve d’Alembert examines not only bees’ swarming but also animalcules. They seem to share a similar and detached attitude of inspecting bodies with “a microscopic eye”.

Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique writes an article of “chaîne des êtres créés” and there criticizes the idea of plenitude from the biological point of view. He asserts that such complete gradation cannot be and tries to show that there is void in the chain and “cette échelle” (“this ladder”) is broken or interrupted. Voltaire’s satirical attitude towards the chain of being bears a striking resemblance to Beckett’s broken ladder in his Lost Ones. Therefore “dépeupleur” is, we might say, one who criticizes the plenitude in a satirical way and in that sense resembles this French writer.