Beckett: Endgame (Volume F)

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)• Dublin• bachelor’s, Trinity

College• English in Paris• James Joyce• master’s, Trinity

College• Marcel Proust• French Resistance,

World War II• Nobel Prize, 1969

• French versus English

• “write without style”

• language of “darkness”

• postwar representations of the austere

• absence of the artificial

• Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Writing Style

NAGG: “Me sugar-plum!” CLOV: “There’s a rat in the

kitchen!”HAMM: “A rat! Are there

still rats?”CLOV: “In the kitchen

there’s one.” HAMM: “And haven’t you

exterminated him?”CLOV: “Half. You

disturbed us” (p. 785).

Theater of the Absurd

• empty, repetitive dialogue

• grotesquely bare symbolic settings

• refusal to build on dramatic climax

• pun and wordplay

“You’ll look at the wall awhile, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall anymore. Infinite emptiness will be all around you…” (p. 779).

Endgame (1957)

“NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But—

NAGG: Oh!

NELL: Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we will find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more” (p. 773).

Meanings

Why do you think Beckett was so insistent on his stage directions being strictly followed in any production of the play? What role does movement play in the work?

Discussion Questions

How and why do characters break the “fourth wall,” in which the audience is directly involved and characters themselves are aware that they are in a play?

Discussion Questions

Visit the StudySpace at:http://wwnorton.com/studyspace

For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for

The Norton Anthology Of World Literature.

This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for

The Norton Anthology

of World Literature