Endgame: Overview

Critic: David Hayman
Source: Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd ed.,
edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991
Criticism about: Samuel (barclay) Beckett (1906-1989),
also known as: Samuel (Barclay) Beckett, Samuel Barclay
Beckett



A comic/tragic mime for human puppets treating a depleted universe at
the apocalyptic end of its tether, Endgame is quintessential Beckett.
Typically, this play is impoverished in every sense, but dauntingly rich in
implications and effects. It has been noted that Samuel Beckett tends,
no matter what his medium, to eliminate everything inessential, but in the
process, he manages to introduce a multitude of mysteries. In Endgame
he finds ways to imprint on the tabula rasa of experience small signs that
expand in our consciousness. 

The set for Endgame is a case in point, as are its cast and action. The
curtain opens on a sparely furnished box with two small curtained
windows located like eye holes to the left and right backstage, a door
leading to the kitchen offstage, a picture turned face to the wall, Hamm's
throne/chair on castors center stage, two ``ashbins.'' Mourning is implied
by the ponderous bulk of Hamm and the two cans being initially draped in
sheets, the curtained windows, the reversed picture. As critics have
plausibly noted, the set resembles the interior of a skull with two eye
holes lidded but looking out on a double desert, land and sea, a terminal
emptiness. The characters of Endgame are on the very edge of
mortality in the wake of an unspecified catastrophe. Since little is made
of the loss, we must assume that the catastrophe is a thing of the
distant past, if catastrophe it was and not simply the gradual wearing
away of substance. The play is played by and around a remnant of four
reluctant survivors. It is about diminution and ending, a topic handled
with the wit of a mortician in the shadow of a possible death. 

None of this should be very entertaining. On its surface it is all patently
antitheatrical. In fact, by using and abusing all the tricks of the trade: by
slyly inserting small nuggets of humor, by using a purified plot, setting,
cast, and action to suggest parallel systems of significance, Beckett has
created an engrossing dramatic event, a mystery play for our times. 

The play has four characters and two invisible supernumeraries (a small
boy reportedly seen from one of the windows and an old lady, perhaps
dead). The principals are the master, Hamm, the servant/son Clov, and
the two canned progenitors, Magg and Nell, jack-in-the-box figures for a
forgotten past who pop up periodically from their ashbins. It has been
noted that all the names can mean nail (coffin nail or unresponsive
thing?), though both the character and the name of the imperious Hamm
seem more appropriately to suggest a hammer. Name games in Beckett
are always open-ended. The Shakespearean allusions, like the Dantean or
biblical ones, justify a host of related readings. Is this a post-deluge or a
pre-Judgement world; is this yet another version of Hell; are we
reconstituting Shakespearean plots...? 

Endgame's action, like that of the similarly spartan Waiting for Godot,
is essentially devoted to killing time without performing significant
actions. Beckett was profoundly aware that nothing could be funnier,
more senseless, more pathetic than human existence, a life sentence
that defies both words and images. The excuses we make up to explain
and justify that existence are worthy topics for mockery and disdain.
They are Beckett's ultimate subject matter, just as ritual and farce are
his favorite modes. No wonder this play is decked in the trappings of
low-quality theatrical or music hall farce, no wonder all of its protagonists
remind us of clowns and fools. Every bit of mime and slapstick is played
slow motion; even the stichomythic dialogue is laced with pauses; the
gags are sick jokes deflating conventional values; and the actions are
formulaic and ritualistic in their absurdity. 

Nothing if not consistent, Endgame (the word refers to the terminal
move in chess) is a play that eschews conventional action. Like the
famous chess game Beckett's Murphy plays with the catatonic Mr. Endon
in Murphy, the game in which neither party's men make contact with the
opponent, little progress is made during the drama toward either check or
mate. The tone is set by Clov's opening mime, the meticulous and
reiterated climbing up and down a ladder to look through the windows to
see if anything has changed. This metaphor for view is matched by
Hamm, whose blindness and immobility make his commanding presence,
his whimsical commands, cruel wit, and childish petulance emblematic of
impotent power and a darkly absurd destiny. 

It is Hamm, the chess king, who, powerless, controls the action by
dominating center stage as his pawn, Clov, more or less willingly does his
will: fetching his toy dog; covering and uncovering Nagg and Nell, his
parents; promising to provide him with painkillers; staring at the outer
waste. Such is the infertile ground on which Beckett scatters seeds of
solace, unrelieved suspense, a handful of narratives, some pointless
parables worthy of the action. Add to that the irreverent dialogue, and
the crabbed presence of Nagg and Nell with their mock-syrupy
reminiscences of an occluded past and you have the ``substance'' of
this play whose appeal derives not from that substance but from
Beckett's ingenious but unlabored engagement with it. For ultimately, it is
to the splendor of his treatment, the orchestration of dialogue, pauses
and movement, and the inscription of erased conventions that Endgame
owes its success. 

By stripping his action of everything that might be deemed inessential,
the author has opened his play up to the director, the actor, and the
reader. Predictably, critics, like biblical exegetes, have found multitudes
of meanings, erecting systems of reading based on philosophy,
Shakespeare, history, psychoanalysis, etc. Beckett, having made this
inevitable, abhorred the results, but then, such readings, if carried far
enough, all tend to self-destruct, leaving the play as open and as
evocative as before, as individual in its impact and echoes. It is in the
nature of such theatre that every reader reads his own play and that
interpretations, though not necessarily wrong, are beside the mark or
only way stations. One might say, as Beckett himself said of Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, that Endgame is about itself.

Source: David Hayman, "Endgame: Overview" in Reference Guide to
English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press,
1991.

Source Database: Literature Resource Center





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