The Strategy of Samuel Beckett's Endgame

THE STRATEGY OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S ENDGAME«ART," SAID SAMUEL BECKETT in writing of Proust, «is the apotheosis of solitude." Certainly Beckett belongs with such authors as Proust and Kafka for whom the deadly isolation of individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface. The truth of personality is inscrutable: open perhaps to the intuition of the friend or of the reader, but merely distorted by any self-sufficient exercise of analytic reason. Hence the art of writing is, negatively, to render one's subject opaque to analysis; positively it is to invite the reader in his own solitude to grope, to imagine-often through clues which are absurd in their irreducible concreteness-and thus to sense through all the babble of language the meaning of another solitude. The opacity of Beckett's most recent play, Endgame, is easily demonstrated by a description of the bare facts of the playas they would appear to a fresh spectator. Clov, an inferior, stands in the doorway of a barren, grey-lit room, staring at an armchair covered with a white sheet. Two ash-cans, also sheet-covered, stand dowllstage. Clov pulls off the sheets. The occupant of the armchair is Hamm, a chronic invalid. The occupants of the ash-cans are Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell. So the "day" starts. As it drags toward its close, the characters complain, reminisce, quarrel, subside. They concern themselves with food, their physical pains, their mutual dislike, their boredomand above all with their notion that things may be coming to an end. The old people apparently die in their ash-cans. Clov prepares to leave. Hamm is left in center stage as he was first revealed, mute and motionless, his face covered by a bloodstained handkerchief. In all of this, one misses the ordinary connections of cause and effect which make daily life so manageable. Why and how the world outside has become such a blank is not told. Why Nagg and Nell are confined to ash-cans is not explained. The characters fly into rages on inadequate stimulus. They contradict themselves, they lose the thread of talk. They spend their most intent energies on such trifles as locating Hamm's chair in the exact center of the room. And so on. There is something pitiable here, something terrible, too; but what is it? The art of reading such a play is not, I think, to reduce it, as Bonamy Dobrt~e does, to a game of "hunt the symbol." (For Dobn~e, Endgame turns out to be a morality with Clov as the Body and Hamm as the 36 1959 STRATEGY OF BECKETI"S Endgame 37 Soul. )1 Being human, the reader must indeed bring his wits to bear on the play; but the trick is to know when to stop. Analysis cannot break every puzzle of Endgame. Its construction implicitly ensures that each single hypothesis will create as many problems for the reader as it solves. (For instance, if Clov is the Body and Hamm the Soul, what are Nagg and Nell?) But analysis can qualify the dramatic experience; it can bring the reader to the point of maximum sensitivity where he acquires the artistic faith to trust his own inner vision. I will attempt a reading of Endgame, first by assessing the frames of fantasy in which the action takes place; then by examining the characters; and finally by tracing the tragic action and its implicit effect upon the audience. II The one bare room of Endgame and its adjoining kitchen constitute a limbo without calendar date or specified locale. Although the older characters recall such definite places as Sedan, the Ardennes, and Lake Como, these settings have evidently vanished as far as they are concerned . The world which Clove examines from the windows is a desert, half earth, half sea, all under a motionless, sunless atmosphere. The characters themselves lack the biographies which would establish them as tax-paying individuals. They have no definite occupation or present relationship to any society. They are the only people there are. From all. this abstractness, the reader may safely infer that Man and his Situation are the real objects of the play, which to...