Endgame Group

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bhattarai
bhattarai
Student

What are the elements of absurdity found in Samuel Beckett's 'Endgame'?

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Posted by bhattarai on Thursday August 20, 2009 at 6:38 AM and tagged with binda, literature.

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  1. kc4u Teacher
    College - Senior

    eNotes Editor

    If one treats Endgame as an absurdist play at all (there are other, better ways of looking at it), the elements in the play that may be seen to corroborate the absurdist/existentialist vision of a human world stripped of meaning through proliferation and infinite deferral can be the following--

    1. the non-realistic conception of the whole play, the unnamability of its time and space. the setting is as abstract as it can get with the expression 'bare interior' being used. the space might well be internal with the two high-windows resembling the two eyes and the shade being that of a skull.

    2.There is very little of action; all of it is verrbalized, with bristles of pauses and silences. The emphasis is on stasis, immobility, sterility and so on.

    3. Impossibility of a closure. Both Hamm and Clov want to end the metaphorical game of chess. It is the end that can make their existence meaningful but the end never comes and they remain meaningless and unthinking.

    4. There are parents in the dustbin, a veritable Waste-image that connects with the Absurdist idea of man as a scrap-object

    5. The equivocity of redemption in the existence-inexistence dialectic/confusion of the child outside.

    6. Hardly any background information about the characters. There is some on Clov in Hamm's 'Chronicle' but all that is stripped of all its particular details.

    7. The way the Godotesque routines of insignificant actions are used in relation to the void that is the world of Endgame puts the accent on alienation and meaninglessness.

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    Posted by kc4u on Tuesday October 27, 2009 at 1:00 AM