ARTS1030 Lecture 11: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957)
4 Jun 2018
School
Course
Professor
11. 17/05/18 Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957)
Connections between Engame and Lear
• Nothingness, existentialism
Intro to context - Endgame
• Despairing endpoint of late modernity (Endgame) - social and cultural
disaster, world wars, holocaust - Europe seems and feels exhausted of
meaning, exhausted sense of self as “doing well”, being lost
• What humanity is capable of (demonstrated through world wars) makes
western civilisation question art, beauty, the reality of these things
• Moral decimation, physical destruction of civilisation (Endgame) - dystopic?
• Beckett’s works deliberately resist meaning - audience is not allowed to come
to a conclusion - resistance to meaning is deliberately enacted
• Beckett was a scholar, wrote an essay on Proust - “the distortions of
intelligibility”
• “The danger lies in the neatness of identifications” - Beckett - ‘Dante…
Bruno.Vico…. Joyce’
Beckett - literature, context (School of Life youtube movie)
• Bleak view of life
• Morbid sense of humor
• Tragicomedy (waiting for godot)
• First novel was rejected 42 times
• Dramatist of desolation
• Anxiety, panic attacks, depression
• Works are highly non-specific, do not reference explicitly world wars, but are
clearly influenced by devastating history of wars, the mistreatment of his
Jewish friends, destruction in France, etc.
• Ignorance, impotence, and failure characterise his later works
• Waiting for Godot - highly successful, but also met with confusion and
hostility, even hostility - Godot never arrives
• Universal, existential condition
• Key word in his plays - “perhaps”
• If we leave the plays perplexed, this is an appropriate response
• Endgame - Hamm: “We’re not beginning… To… Mean something?” Clov:
“Mean something? You and I mean something? (Brief laugh) Ah that’s a good
one”
• Works of art offer an experience, not just an idea of purpose
• Environment / world has been destroyed - Endgame
• Still, the plays are structured
• Beckett viewed play writing as a distraction from the ‘more important’ writing
of prose
• However, Beckett’s influence in terms of theatre/playwriting is highly
significant
Endgame
• Not the first to use metatheoretical devices
• Beckett skewed what seems acceptable for drama
• Very bleak - more so than Waiting for Godot, also more unfamiliar to the
audience
• Everything that Clov sees out the window is deserted, lifeless, destroyed
• The characters have memories of a world similar to our own - memory is an
important component of the play - highlights the dereliction, destruction of the
play’s world
• The world they are in now is existentially bleak
