I became reaquainted with Samuel Beckett's absurdist one act play, "Endgame", over my holiday, remembering it strongly from the best introductory course I had taken in college, a Drama/Lit course at EMU. At 19 I found it about unintelligible until we started stripping down the essense of the characters, the tension between Hamm and Clov, the meaning of one's only being able to stand, the other's only being able to sit (or lack of meaning, exisitential, nihilistic), the secondary parents of Hamm in Nagg and Nell and the imagery of their being placed in an ashcan relying on the subservient Clov to give them their daily rations as they briefly recount nostalgically their lives together. Four characters and 80 some odd pages of script make-up this amazingly lucid act of human nonsense.
Plotwise, it's like this: Clov can only stand, serves Hamm who can only sit and had apparently taken him in since he was a boy and makes him do every little menial thing for his pleasure. Clov has the notion to leave but is inanely bound to his monotonous routine, and the main tension is in whether or not he'll go and also, why the hell he doesn't just up and leave like *that*. Nagg and Nell are Hamm's parents, live in ashcans, and are a morbid bit of imagery honed-in on the unrequited promise of death. The characters banter back and forth, Hamm ordering Clov to get his toy dog or to move his chair to another position or to report the goings on outside, but everything stays the same, always. This is the ritual of the human existence.
We were told in class that this story was post-nuclear, that the characters existed to show us life after "the bomb" dropped, but apparently Beckett doesn't like this interpretation, and I only mention it to show what academics are teaching. The desolation of their existence does make this interpretation seem natural, especially as Clov describes the goings on outside as the same thing over and over and the apparent isolation of them in a supposedly post-apocalyptic world. However, I see why Beckett rejects this, because this work seems more timeless: I believe it gets more the core of the meaninglessness of human existence. The notion of master and slave, the inept ruling the inept, the same thing over and over, Clov's leaving to us is so essential because the possibility of removing ourselves from the monotony is what we so cheer for. And apparently he does leave, but in the darkest shadow of my heart I have to wonder how he'll survive, if he even remembers how to. Those are but a few of the contemplations that may cross the mind as I read this book.
The brilliance is major in the delivery. There are only vague moments of sentimentality as Nagg and Nell reminisce over bike riding in the good old days, but these notions are immediately blotted out, especially as Nell dies a most unceremonious death forgotten about as soon as it's mentioned, leading to an unseamly revleation, I must quote this part here:
Hamm: Go and see is she dead (Clov goes to bins, raises the lid of Nell's, soops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: Looks like it. (He closes the lid, straightens up. Hamm raises his toque. Pause. He puts it on again.)
Hamm (with his hand to his toque): And Nagg? (Clov raises lid of Nagg's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: Doesn't look like it. (He closes the lid, straightens up.)
I must interject, quickly: This next part was apparently one of Beckett's favorites, too. As you can see there is no sentimentality nor sorrow, death means nothing as it would appear Beckett intended, just another person dying in their ashcan. Anyhow, the point we're coming to:
Hamm (letting go his toque): What's he doing? (Clov raises lid of Naggi's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: He's crying. (He closes lid, straightens up.)
Hamm: Then he's living.
"Then he's living", the definition of existence in sorrow world. It's chilling to read, and so perfect, before Hamm nearly immediately moves to asking Clov, "Did you ever have an instant of happiness?", where Clov responds, "Not to my knowledge." The trapped soul of a slave to the world, at least that's how I see it. "Endgame" is ultimately open to many interpretations, but it's hard not to believe this is Beckett's sketch of human beings just moving through time ignorantly.
And so it goes: a captivating one act play on the state of things, Beckett plays the absurd disconnected meaningless card quite admirably with his "Endgame", and this shall spawn more hours of Beckett reading as I have on my shelf the trilogy of novels that would help him get his Pulitzer: "Molloy", "Malone Dies", and "The Unnamable". Oh what would we do without books?! Apparently, what we've always been doing.
"Clov: If I don't kill that rat he'll die"
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