The man is a poet, "caught in the writer's trap, the expectation of inspiration." The woman seems to be his muse. It may be Beckett is personifying her as a woman only in the abstract sense but it is just as likely, considering Beckett's most famous writer-character, "Krapp", that she is also a lost love, a once-literal muse. Krapp's imagination is impotent though. M has not reached that stage. He is still having occasional flashes of inspiration. And this must have been very much how the seventy-year-old Beckett felt himself; writing was becoming increasing difficult for him. Either way, "although not quite a character, she is ... both an object of desire and a force beyond desire."