Samuel Beckett - Endgame (Summary)

This has been probably the most eccentric and illogical play that I have ever read. I mean where to start with this. The settings, the characters, the story line everything is so unconventional, I wonder what really was going on in the writer's head. I am not privy to it and I don't claim to deduce any intelligent undertones from it all.

In a sparse setting in a room with couple of windows, this one act play has four characters that all live in this room. Hamm is blind and on a wheelchair. Clov his servant is his only eyes and help and who can not sit. Hagg and Nell as Hamm's parents and they have no legs and they live in the dustbins in the room itself. The drama drags itself over obsessively hopeless situations and dialogues. As with Beckett's any other work, repetition is the key aspect. Hamm and Clov increasingly engage in a despairing banter that is difficult to make sense of. Outside the room, through the windows the scene is of desolateness, the reason to which are unknown. Nature has abandoned them and all and the only view outside would be of uncompromising invariability.  Though there is an passage of time as in day and night, but in the large scheme of things, time is meaningless. We are not told of their ages or of the times in which they lived. Any attempt to make meaning (of life) is doomed to fail. There is no wholesome life or living, any grandstanding or intellectual discourses on how to live it. Instead what we have are small absurd moments, repetitive actions, banal talk, overhanging gloom and an eventual death. Life has been broken into inconsequential moments that are to be lived and lived in doing that amounts to nothing more. The absurdity of these moments (and life itself) is not in living it, but in trying to make a sense or any sense of it.

Hamm: Clov! 
Clov: [impatiently] What is it? 
Hamm: We're not beginning to ... to ... mean something? 
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah that's a good one! 
Hamm: I wonder. [Pause.]” 

In making it absolute of time, the writer has negated a possibility of linear progress, of betterment. Instead, the continual repetition of banal acts reinforces that the only end if of nothingness. Even the idea of change, of meaning, of nature is frowned upon, because something like this has previously happened and it will happen again with the same outcome. But beyond death, what is that outcome is not certain. Death is an inevitable conclusion to this charade of an existence, but isn't it for all existences. In showing the torment is eternal and cyclical where each day unfolds the same farce of 'living' till eternity, and nothing ever changes in this slow march to nothingness, the writer turns inside out that small room into the bigger canvas of our lives where the self is trapped similarly (in a small room) trying to live those moments, grappling and trying everything in the hope that something sticks before the coming Endgame.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… 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 still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.”