The man is a poet but he is also – and unexpectedly – a mathematician, a rational man. Numbers play a significant part in Beckett's works (particularly the number three as it was a favourite of Dante's). "M's addiction to numbers – the four cases, the reference to cube roots, the two statistical possibilities given for the fourth case – be explained as a defensive posture. M must know that the woman's appearance is at random and defies logic. His careful efforts to establish mathematically the exact and proper conditions for her appearance are merely an attempt to give order to an experience he knows, deep inside, is beyond rational measurement or prediction."