Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” Research Paper

Endgame, like Samuel Beckett’s other plays and novels, depicts a post-apocalyptic world, where only four people and a few scattered objects still endure. Everything that still lingers in this world is stripped down to a very basic form: the objects, the actions, the dialogue. The play is a minimalist representation of the very complex universe that we know. The universe appears to be at its twilight, waiting for complete darkness to set in. However, the paradox of the world described in the play is precisely the fact that, despite its insubstantiality, it drags on, without ending. As in Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, to which the play refers several times, in Endgame the world is moving but somehow there is no progression. Although there everything seems dead, there is no closure.

As the title suggests, the play is, to a certain degree, a metaphor of a chess game that seems to have reached a dead end. The characters can indeed be likened to chess pieces because of their repetitive and limited actions: the legless Nell and Nagg are confined to their dustbins, Hamm can only sit and Clov can only stand. Moreover, their world contains only a few objects but which are very suggestive: a ladder, a wall, a window, a telescope, a handkerchief, a clock, a whistle, some painkillers, etc. All of these basic items signify something: they are remnants of once complex and full life. Although very simple, these objects are very meaningful, precisely because of their unusual usage in the play: “By the twist of usage, Beckett causes simple things to resonate” (Maughlin 89). The painkillers, for instance, hint of utter desolation and despair, while the ladder and the telescope can be seen as relics of a universe where human aspirations were still extant.

The game of chess is, in fact, life itself in its monotonous flux. Beckett appeals to the chess metaphor to portray life in its absurdity and illogicality: “For Beckett, a game of chess reflects life itself… But the game of life, unlike a game of chess, is quite irrational. Man is a being tossed in the absurd universe like a piece on the chessboard, and his fate is as dubious as that of a chessman” (Kumar 545). Position and movement are very important in Beckett’s plays, as they emphasize the human beings’ lack of freedom. Life is seen as an entrapping and absurd game, which seems to offer no escape and no relief. It is only the shadow, a mere reminder: “Endgame is a play about remainders, about the fact of remaining, about the being-there of ‘remainderhood’” (Smith 99). Thus, although there is very little to live for, life on this empty planet moves on.

The play already opens with the idea of an ending. Clov announces the approach of a finish in the very first line, but at the very same time, imbues his statement with uncertainty and vagueness: “Clov: Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (Beckett 3). Significantly, what Clov announces is only the beginning of the end, a state where these two extremities meet but where there is no actual conclusion. As Hamm remarks later in the play, the end and the beginning coincide, but, paradoxically, nothing begins and nothing ends while everything continues: “Hamm: The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (Beckett 78). It is this absurd waiting and continuation that is at the core of Beckett’s plays. Life is both a scene of nothingness and one of infinity, and it is this duality that drives the characters in Beckett to desperation: “Endgame is a despairing study of despair” (Mercier 116). Despair comes here precisely from the uncertainty and the impossibility of ending.

The game lacks a conclusion and therefore its meaning can never be settled. Life is a game where human beings seem to wait for life to finally become life. The meaning of life is deferred until its actual ending, and therefore life cannot be lived as an actual existence but only as endless waiting: “Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of…(he hesitates) …that old Greek, and all lifelong you wait for that to mount up to a life” (Beckett 80). William S. Haney notes that this liminal world that Beckett describes, where we confront both the ending and the fullness of life is a fusion between absence and plenitude: “In alluding to the end of the world and all of its content–objects, time, nature, food, colors, fleas, rats, weather, laughter, kisses, sun, sound, God, and so on–but infinitely deferring this end, Endgame suggests the possibility of experiencing a fusion of fullness and emptiness” (Haney 48). Beckett, therefore, pinpoints in Endgame the essence of life itself, which is not a flow of events but rather the fusion of many contradictions.

Endgame is therefore a representation of life itself as endless waiting for a finish or a conclusion. Thus, Endgame portrays life as an infinite and absurd game of waiting, which absorbs man into its void.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Print.

Haney, William S., II. “Beckett out of his mind: the theatre of the absurd.” Studies in the Literary Imagination.34.2 (2001): 39-55.

Kumar, K. Jeevan. “The chess metaphor in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.” Modern Drama. 40.4 (1997): 540-553.

Maughlin, Susan. “Liminality”. Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. ed. Katherine H. Burkman. Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson U.P., 1987. Print.

Mercier, Vivian. “How to read Endgame.” The Critical Response to Samuel Beckett. ed. Cathleen Culotta Andonian. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Smith, Russell. “Endagme’s Remainders”. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. ed. Mark S. Byron. New York: Rodopi, 2007.