A Note on Perception and Communication in Beckett's Endgame

A NOTE ON PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION IN BECKETT'S ENDGAME INTRODUCING IDS STUDY of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Richard M. Eastman comments: "Beckett belongs with such authors as Proust and Kafka for whom the deadly isolation of individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface."! Having made this general classification of Beckett, Mr. Eastman offers an admirably circumspect analysis of Endgame itself, demonstrating that Beckett's theme of isolation is emphasized by the work's ultimate incomprehensibility as a unit. And certainly the critic is to be commended for resisting all temptations to restrict the play to anyone frame of meaning -not Bonamy Dobrees interpretation of it as a morality play, not even his own discovery that "the play has many features of a chess game in its last phase." Yet, without attempting to erect the meaning or "key" to Endgame, we may see that, on at least one important plane, it is specifically concerned with how man's attempts at perception and communication relate to his assurance of individual existence. Its emphatic pronouncement is that whereas "individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface" it is only in terms of conventional sudace that communication takes place; and thus individuality , contingent upon communication, is dissolved. Beckett portrays the self divided into two persons. The first (Clov) is a busy servant, a workman, whose vitality is the continual fulfilling of patterns which an outer voice of authority imposes upon him. Other than the fact that the voice is there, and his movement (his life) exists only insofar as he obeys the voice, he sees no reason for obeying it, nor any definite end to be achieved. Indeed, it is manifest that his obedient pedorming serves no end at all (he is ordered to move an object from point A to point B, and later to move the same object back again-and so on, ad infinitum); and, therefore, since his identity could only be proven by his being agent to some end, he possibly does not exist. The second person (Hamm) is the authoritarian master whose voice the servant responds to. This master's existence is defined solely by his tiresome game-which he knows a pretense-of repeating trite combinations, patterns, and having them fulfilled by the serv1 . Richard M. Eastman, ''The Strategy of Samuel Beckett's Endgame," Modem Drama, II (May, 1959), 36. 20 1961 BECKETIS ENDGAME 21 ant; thus the actions he imposes become a mere play (one of a wellknown repertoire), all style and technique-and no content. .The master is blind, paralyzed from the waist down, and unable to leave his chair. Without vision all he can do is call out the patterns from memory and then wait eagerly to see if the servant, catching up the master's pretense, will put them into play. One of the chief games the master imposes upon the servant is that of perception; he sends him to look out the window to find, with his relatively good eyes, what exists outside. Invariably, the servant reports that there is grayness outside; though at times, as if to tweak his master's desires for variation in the pattern, he says he sees in the grayness certain objects, perhaps a moving person, for example. But even the elation the master receives from this information is pretense, for the master knows that the servant is playing, perhaps consciously, the game of imposing a subjective illusion upon the outward reality of nothingness. Within Beckett's dual self there is the conflict of self-destruction. Each "person" longs to kill, or at least quiet, the other, even though each realizes such an event would mean mutual dissolution. The servant , tired and embittered from his ceaseless performances, longs to remove the authority which causes all his fruitless pain; yet every time the homicidal impulse arises he subdues it, conscious that, without the patterns and their imposing authority, he would cease to be. More powerful is the blind master's impulse to destroy the servant; for that impulse results from the master's honest vision of what man's role is viS-a.-vis reality. Knowing that he too exists only in terms of his partner, he...