Endgame Group

Question:

healinghands
healinghands
Student
College - Sophomore

What line does Beckett consider most important? How does this dependency compare to Beckett's real life, and what's the purpose of the play?

I have not seen this play before much less heard of it. I am having to write a paper in my Intro to Theatre class and this is a question we have to answer in our essay....please help.

Rate question:

Posted by healinghands on Monday February 16, 2009 at 2:32 PM and tagged with beckett, endgame, play.

Answers:


  1. kc4u Teacher
    College - Senior

    eNotes Editor

    The line that Beckett says is crucial to the play, especially in terms of its performance is Nell's comment "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness". He also speaks of the play as 'saying the final no to nothingness'. An interpretation of this in the context of Beckett's life is almost impossible because in his case it is not a simple overlaying relation between life and art that we encounter. But Nell's line captures the essence of Beckett's vision of life as well as the fundamental nature of his theatre or even his prose/poetical works. The Beckettian tragi-comedy lies in the ridicule of the laughably destitute subject. There is a therapeutic self-directed laughter in his works that cures the subjects of an illusion of a stable and presentable ego. But, they still go on and that underscores their courage. When man is unhappy, he cuts a comic/farcical figure in Beckett, but not in a sadistic way, rather in a realization of the human folly, the neurotic fixation with the unhappy, what Freud called the 'Repetition Compulsion' and so on.

    As for the purpose of the play, it is manifold. the play is an exercise in impossible closure, the perpetual going on of human life in a Dantean hell, the disaster of the War and its Atomic ravages (as Adorno had explained), the Noah-fable from The Bible, the spectacle of suffering humanity with an equivocal hope of redemption (the child outside), the shifty master-slave relation (Hamm-Clov), the issues of paternity and maternity and so on. The purpose of the play, at large is to make the audience recognize the human condition both in its universal as well as its history-specific particular form.

    Rate answer:

    Posted by kc4u on Tuesday October 27, 2009 at 12:46 AM