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The purpose of this paper is to examine what critical reading endowed with “negative capability” is by analyzing the initial critical response to Samuel Beckett’s late prose work Ill Seen Ill Said through the concept of “the implied critic’s decision style” coming from Reuven Tsur’s cognitive poetics. ‘Negative capability,’ as originally formulated by the English poet John Keats, refers to the capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” or to the “ability to make up one’s mind about nothing” without irritably “reaching after fact and reason.” This study first introduces Tsur’s comparative analysis of Eva Metman’s and Günther Anders’s readings of Waiting for Godot, which are presented as two cases exhibiting different degrees of ‘negative capability.’ Tsur’s analysis shows that Anders’s reading, characterized by internal motivation, an operational definition with a highly descriptive content, and active shifts in mental set, exhibits a higher degree of ‘negative capability’ than does Metman’s reading, which is characterized by external evidence, a dependence on theoretical assumptions, and an unwillingness to shift mental set. In a similar fashion, the study goes on to analyze two initial critical readings of Ill Seen Ill Said respectively carried out by Marjorie Perloff and Nicholas Zurbrugg. The analysis finds that Zurbrugg’s reading features a higher degree of ‘negative capability,’ in that it more deeply explores the complex interrelationships between the stylistic characteristics and the semantic aspects of the work, than does Perloff’s reading, which, while specifically analyzing the stylistic characteristics of the work, ends up integrating such an analysis into her broader discussion of the cultural standing of contemporary poetry. The study concludes by pointing out the importance that the cultivation of ‘negative capability’ has for the development of an individual’s personality from an immature ‘ego’ to a mature ‘self’ in psychological and pedagogical contexts, a good close reading can contribute to such cultivation in students performing a non-professional type of literary criticism in secondary or higher education.