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He is selfish and wants always to be the center of attention and considers himself something of a god-like character. He berates his servant Clov, upon whom he is completely dependent. His parents, Nagg and Nell, live in ashbins and occasionally emerge only to be berated by their son. Though the world may be coming to an end, Hamm takes satisfaction in knowing that perhaps all existence may fade to extinction. He hopes to exist long enough only to outlive his father. Nagg is Hamm's father. He and his wife now live in ashbins, having lost their legs in a bicycling accident years ago.
Although their current situation is bleak, there are moments in the play where we understand that in their youth, Nagg and Nell had a great and wondrous love. They still reach for that love, despite the horrid conditions and their ungrateful son. Nell is Hamm's mother. She, like Nagg, lives in an ashbin, also having lost her legs in the bicycling accident years ago. She dies in the play to the great distress of Nagg. The characters, trapped in their single room occupy themselves with routines and tasks.
Hamm is paralyzed and blind, Nagg and Nell cannot leave their ashbins, and the action of the play occurs in a single room, outside of which life evidently cannot survive. These characters struggle to move on or take action, and the actions they do take are often stagnant and nondescript.
Each is dependent upon another for his or her very survival and Hamm questions the benefit of continuing life at all, often pestering nag for the ultimate painkiller—death. The existence of God is also questioned and indirectly denied, painting a bleak picture of life as hard and without redemption, directed by the needs of handicapped tyrants like Hamm. Life seems a merciless cycle of desire and grief, of handicaps and ashbins, and, to these characters, death is no reward for enduring that cycle. The characters of Endgame maneuver through lives of emotional strife that anticipate death, though they lack the means to achieve it on their own.
One of the most obvious themes of Endgame is the necessity of interdependence, even if the relationship is one of hate. Clov, for example, depends on Hamm for food since Hamm is the only one who knows the combination to the cupboard. Hamm relies completely on Clov for movement and vision. Critics often compare Endgame to Beckett's previous drama Waiting for Godot , noting that characters in both plays are grouped in pairs. Endgame is bleaker and more perplexing because it lacks the hope for redemption that Waiting for Godot contains. Generational conflict, particularly between father and son, also emerges as a prominent theme.
Hamm twice tells a story about a father and son and seems to view parent-child relationships only in terms of power and resentment. Critics have argued that Hamm resents Nagg, his father, for not being kind to him when he was young, whereas Hamm resents Clov, his son, for being young at a time when his own life is in decline. Endgame has also been interpreted as a depiction of humanity's denial of such life processes as death and procreation. Endgame is a self-reflexive work in which the hand of Beckett can often be seen. For example, Hamm's narration is at once taking its own course in developing his personality while it also comments on the idea of creation, alluding to the creative process of an author.
At the end of the story Hamm talks about the difficulty of creation:. The characters make numerous, explicit references throughout Endgame to their roles as characters in a play. Hamm at one-point states: Clov's confusion over which items to fetch first and his antics with the ladder could be directly out of a film starring Charlie Chaplin , whom Beckett admired. Commenting on Endgame himself, Beckett identified the phrase "nothing is funnier than unhappiness" as key to the play's interpretation and performance.
Endgame 's visual performance and self-reflexive dialogue constantly remind the audience that they are watching a performance by actors. That I'm being watched! Beckett uses stage directions to create dynamic relationships between characters and the things they require to live: Hamm needs his armchair, and Nagg and Nell require their ashbins. Beckett creates a vivid physical world to complement the powerful and stripped-down dialogue.
Beckett presents the characters' inability to understand through abstract language and stagnant dramatic structure. Beckett has stripped down and broken apart his words and sentences. Words are able to contradict each other and are often elliptic. Clov utters the first line of the play: As Beckett's characters search themselves and the world around them, language reflects the precarious balance between understanding and confusion.
Samuel Beckett's plots are notable for their lack of the classical dramatic structure. The minor plot line of Endgame is that of Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell.
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It is clear that they had a romantic love in their youth, but they now live in ashbins and are not well-taken-care-of by their son. The end of the play finds both Nagg and Nell dead, without having experienced much satisfaction throughout the play. Indeed, most of their interactions are attempts to recall their past happiness or to endure their current helpless situation.
Drama known as the theater of the absurd begins in the s. Endgame , Beckett's first play after Waiting for Godot , continues in the tradition that Waiting for Godot established. Although Beckett does not place the characters and actions of Endgame in a specific time and place, the play's only set can be viewed as a bomb shelter after a nuclear bomb has detonated and destroyed much, if not all, life outside the shelter. This was certainly a looming fear when Beckett wrote the play and when it was performed in Although today this fear is still present, in the fear was at an all-time high, and the likelihood of such an event seemed all too possible and near.
The late s and the s were dominated by the cold war , an intense rivalry between the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union. After World War II , Europe was divided into two zones of power, a capitalist west and a socialist east. The rivalry soon became worldwide, and there was always a threat that it could have developed into full-scale nuclear war.
The struggle did become violent in when communist North Korea invaded South Korea , beginning the Korean War , which ended with the country divided. Eisenhower on January 5, , pledged military and economic support to any Middle Eastern country needing help in resisting communist aggression. Marking another escalation in the cold war , the doctrine was intended to check the increase of Soviet influence in the Middle East and the increasingly strong Soviet support given the Arab states.
In the late s and early s, writers were trying to overthrow dramatic conventions and wanted to challenge audiences with something new. Sartre's viewpoint, combined with Albert Camus 's writings, provided the building blocks for the absurdist movement, which began to take shape in the early s. In , Ionesco premiered his play The Chairs, which is an excellent example of the theater of the absurd. However, it was not until and the premiere of En Attendant Godot , or Waiting for Godot , that absurdism reached a popular and international audience.
Waiting for Godot is perhaps the best-known work from the absurdist movement. The two-act tragicomedy tells the story of two old men, Vladimir and Estragon, who cannot decide if they should leave or stay and wait for Godot, who may or may not arrive and rescue them from their desperate situation. Endgame takes this struggle to the next level as Hamm and Clov struggle with the meaning, if there is any, of living at all.
Beckett's importance to the absurdist movement is obvious, but saying that he is an absurdist writer is not giving full credit to his wide range of work. Beckett's writing stands out above the other absurdist works in its ingenuity, universality, and humanity. When Endgame opened in , Beckett described the event as "rather grim, like playing to mahogany, or rather teak.
Kenneth Tynan in the Observer said that Beckett's new play made it "clear that his purpose is neither to move nor to help us. For him, man is a pygmy who connives at his own inevitable degradation. He considered Hamm "the intellectual, paralysed, blind as talkative as a fourteenth century doctor. He is waited upon by the Common Man, half way between man and beast" who "has been given a simian appearance: The intellectual's father and mother are stuffed into two dustbins; from time to time a lid is lifted and one of the parents begins to talk. Worsley in the Listener said of Waiting for Godot , "Mr.
Beckett's neurosis and mine were for quite long stretches on the same theme; in Endgame they never tangled. He has, in Endgame , … expanded not the public but the private images. He has concentrated not on what is common between his audiences and him but on what is private in himself.
Setzer never forget the play's portent, but neither do they shortchange its mordant humor. The director approaches Endgame as a gem to be played, as a piece to be performed. Chaikin is an experimental artist who is scrupulous when dealing with classics. The acting is prodigious. McDaniel is a writer with a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan.
In the following essay, McDaniel discusses Beckett's Endgame. Samuel Beckett's writing can be something of a puzzle. There are no final positions or absolute interpretations. Endgame is, however, a unique masterpiece with an intricate dramatic structure that runs contrary to traditional theatrical structure. Endgame was groundbreaking because it dared not to adhere to accepted dramatic rules. Beckett chooses his words carefully, and the nature of the dialogue is circular, for example in Hamm's opening soliloquy: Yes, there it is, it's time it ended and yet I hesitate to— he yawns —to end.
The breakdown of language reflects the breakdown of the characters' ability to perceive the world around them. His use of self-reflexive dialogue informs the audience that they are sitting in a theater watching a play, alluding to the play as a "game. Endgame 's structure breaks from the theory that shaped centuries of dramas and tragedies.
Aristotle wrote that tragedy is "an imitation of an action. Beckett strips bare all detail except the necessary minimum, and the detail he does provide is often vague. Beckett's use of dramatic motivation is also minimal. In traditional drama, a character's motivations are made clear to the audience, but the character's actions in Endgame are peculiar.
One may wish to go to the theater to come away with conclusions and answers, but Beckett presents a fictional world as complex as the real world, where conclusions are uncertain and answers not easily defined. Endgame can be seen as the highest sort of theater, where events take place in the midst of the life of the audience, and it is the audience's responsibility to take what it can from what is presented rather than being force fed easily discernible plots. Despite flying in the face of recognized theatrical devices, there is an innovative dramatist at work, who decides to use chess as a way to play out this human predicament.
Beckett uses chess as the play's controlling metaphor, and he explores the human dilemma, mortality, and God's existence, without providing simple answers, as his characters, and the audience, move through an uncertain existence. The game of chess becomes the metaphor that gives a seemingly structureless play a dramatic scheme. The characters in Endgame resemble chess pieces. The metaphorical king of Endgame is the center of attention, and the rules of chess apply to the characters, their setting, and their situation.
The Last Modernist, Anthony Cronin writes:. When it was produced in Berlin in Beckett told one of the actors, 'Hamm is a king in this chess game lost from the start … Now at the last he makes a few senseless moves as only a bad player would … He is only trying to delay the inevitable end … He's a bad player. And the audience can see the moves of the king once the game has been set up. Hamm and Clov can be viewed as king and knight, and Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, function as pawns.
Beckett further emphasizes this by using two different colors to describe his characters. When introduced, Hamm and Clov both have a "very red face. In chess, each piece is moved according to specific rules and is removed from the board when it is captured by the move of one of the opposing pieces into its square. The king is the focus of the game as each player tries to checkmate the other player's king. The king can move one square in any direction but only one square at a time and cannot move into check.
Hamm, Endgame 's crippled king, can only move with the aid of Clov, the play's knight, which ultimately leads to Hamm's demise. The move of the knight in chess resembles a capital L two squares vertically followed by one to the side, or two to the side and one up or down. In literary lore, the knight is often the king's most ardent protector—or deceiver. Beckett uses both of these ideas with Clov, who exists in a master-servant relationship with Hamm. The Sadness of Incest. The Presence of the Actor.
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This distrust of philosophy explains why the body appears on stage and at the same time does not appear, why Winnie is physically grounded in the earth, why there is a metaphysics of being in these works yet only a failed attempt at it. The three plays represent a gradation from motion to stillness, from a possible escape to a definitive no exit.
The limitation of the body in space is the reverse of the dilation of time, and they both suggest the feeling of agony, of sheer torture that, through words, the characters try to evade. As Steven Connor indicates about these characters, the more still they are, the more they speak In his spatial models, Beckett defines a philosophical mode. While words programmatically deceive in his works, Beckett creates a living space of the text and the stage — a space where everything is said beyond language and sometimes against it.
In his theatre, space transcends words: They do not move Beckett, While these two lines can be, and have been, construed to mean many different things, the motionless tableau cannot be but what it is: Conversely, without the dustbins from which they speak, the dialogue between Nell and Nagg in Endgame would sound plausibly domestic.
It is the visual context of the plays that accomplishes the message.
However, what separates the two characters is, more than anything, the set. The sets he envisaged are unalterable. The characters — like us all, the author seems to suggest — are trapped, but not in words, not in an endless time or a timeless ending, but in the absolute stillness of space. In the same space, the passing of time seems to lead to no change at all. The four leaves in the tree or the huge mound in which Winnie is buried imply, in this sense, just imperceptible changes brought about by time in space.
An eternity might have passed between the first and the second part of Waiting for Godot , but because the space is almost the same, we do not notice, we do not know. One of the major philosophical concerns evident in the critical literature on Beckett is the dialectic of presence-absence. To seem to be there, to be there and not to be , are three different manifestations of the same principle of absence despite evoked presence. The ambiguity of the presence of objects in space is in this sense like that of words to which Beckett once directly referred: In the phenomenological strategy of subverting the thereness of presence, Beckett employs a highly personal artistic device: In his drama, stillness is a passage to the neant.
If one accepts the thesis that the set of Endgame describes the interior of a human skull, then one question is fundamental: What Velasquez creates using visual frames windows, doors, mirrors , Beckett does by the means of spatial modes gaps and curtains: The mysterious effect on the viewers is that they tend to be reflected by, and placed in, the work rather than outside it. It is important to stress that the set of Endgame , with its two small curtained windows — suggesting a human skull indeed — perfectly resembles the bare set of the Meninas.
This is, certainly, more than an optical illusion or cultural coincidence.
In , Peter Brook staged King Lear as a Shakespearian Endgame , underlying the profound reverberation of Shakespeare in Beckett, but from the opposite direction, as in a backward game of influence: More than these themes, Brook learned from Beckett the perfect economy of space. The show marked a shift from rich Shakespearean scenery to a total simplicity of the set.
It was the starting point of a theory which was to become the textbook of contemporary theatre: Perhaps more philosopher than playwright in this sense, he prepares the stage to convey the idea of emptiness in human existence and, eventually, to make the spectators feel that around them, in the end, there is only emptiness.
Stripping away the superfluous layers of theatricality — props, rich scenery, accessories — Beckett reaches the essence of minimalism: But what he never forgets is the curtain between. When the curtain falls, the effacement of presence is complete and the spectator is alone in emptiness. In his heroic search for the poor theatre , Grotowski dismissed the curtain as a useless accessory of the bourgeois theatre.
In his pure theatre, Beckett celebrates, precisely against this kind of sentiment, the metaphorical significance of the curtain. The same powerful presence of the curtain is accentuated in Breath , the thirty-five-second miniature that takes place between two curtains. Even Cascando and Words and Music , written for radio, end, surprisingly enough, with the same word: The curtain is thus the only real ending in a universe dominated by a permanent eschatology Clement, The stillness, the silence, and the darkness Beckett sought for his characters typify the space of audience.
The sensation of entrapment experienced by the characters on stage implies a pact with the viewer. From this perspective, the ideal spectator for Waiting for Godot is someone who is torn between staying and leaving, someone whose conscience is captured in a dialogue that may be imagined to run like this:. In his first play, Eleutheria , Beckett introduced a character called the spectator.