Samuel Beckett's Endgame: A Structural Analysis

Samuel Beckett's Endgame: A Structural Analysis HANS-PETER HASSELBACH • A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS of Samuel Beckett's drama Endgame may appropriately begin with a comment once made by the French film maker Jean-Luc Godard. Asked if his films had a beginning, a middle and an end he replied, "Yes, but not necessarily in that order." A first look at Beckett's play could lead to the same impression, but a closer view of the seemingly gratuitous structure will reveal its intricate and functional design and show the legitimacy of Beckett's statement at his Berlin production in 1967: "There are no accidents in Fin de Partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition.") In this paper I try to shed light on this calculated pattern by examining the structure of the dramatic action in Endgame, thus disclosing Beckett's successful fusion of form and content . More particularly, my approach aims to show that the thematic elements combined in the play's title, "ending" and "playing," constitute an opposition that becomes the basis of Beckett's dramatic structure. In classical closed drama2 the structure of the action is governed by the overall direction of the play; the parts derive from the whole. Each single dramatic situation is a functional part of the whole, serving as a taking-off point for the next stage of a continuing action, "in which the decisions of the dramatis personae constantly transform the original situation and push it toward its final point of resolution."3 Thus the division of the play into acts is more important than its division into scenes, since the end of each act marks the end ofa stage in the action.4 But when the dominant structural principle is not teleological motion but associative unfolding of actions, situations or ideas, then the 25 26 HANS-PETER HASSELBACH scene becomes the basic structural unit. It is characterized by a greater independence, and can be a paradigmatic segment which presents a facet of the whole dramatic design. In such a play there is no causal relationship among the scenes; they do not imply each other, as in classical drama. Instead of a continuum of action there is a succession of scenes. With this breakdown ofclassical structure comes a related change in dramatic subject matter: the plays take on a distinctly episodic character. Instead of a well-wrought plot we have a central theme of which each scene is an episodic variation. These structural and thematic features are evident in Beckett's Endgame,5 in which the author has chosen the scene as a basic structural principle, although he gives no explicit demarcations of the scenes. By omitting breaks between them, Beckett stresses an internal organization based on consistency of meaning and coherence of mood in each new context. In his instructions for the Berlin production of Endgame Beckett identified sixteen scenes as the smallest units ofhis dramatic structure.6 1. Cloy's pantomime and first monologue 2. Hamm's awakening, first monologue and first dialogue with Cloy and Nagg 3. Nell-Nagg dialogue 4. Clov-Hamm dialogue and Hamm's first wheelchair turn around the room 5. Cloy's activities with ladder and telescope 6. Flea episode 7. Hamm-Clov dialogue with Hamm's prophecy, ending in toy dog episode 8. Cloy's rebellion, Hamm's madman story, alarm clock episode 9. Hamm's "story" 10. Rat episode, prayer, Nagg's curse 11. Hamm's story continued 12. Hamm's second turn around the room 13. Hamm-Clov dialogue in mood offarewell 14. Hamm's "role" 15. Last dialogue between Hamm and Cloy, ending with Cloy's monologue 16. Hamm's final monologue This sequence of scenes constitutes an action in approximately the shape of a classical Freytag pyramid, and in this respect can be considered a parody of traditional tragedy: "Parody means the use of forms in an age when acceptance of them is impossible. It demonstrates this im- ENDGAME: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS 27 possibility and thereby alters the forms."7 The following structure is apparent : Scene i exposition (initiation of action with exciting force: "and wait for him to whistle me") Scene ii-ix rising actin ("something is taking its course...