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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

   eNotes Editor

   Martin Esslin's book The Theatre of the absurd begins with a chapter on Beckett who is considered to be the leader of the so-called Absurdist theatre. Please note this is just a critical label and not a deliberate authorial movement at all. Esslin uses Camus's idea of absurdism to interpret the contemporary theatre as a projection of an absurd world where meaning has reached a point of self-cancellation via infinite complication and proliferation.

   Endgame is Beckett's critical masterpiece, even more so than Godot perhaps. The idea of absurdity occurs in the world of the play in different ways---

   1. It is the end of something that defines its shape and gives it meaning. The full stop gives meaning to the sentence. Death to life. This play suspends that endgame, thus turning it into a world where meaning is eternally unfinished

   2. The withdrawal of back-stories, character-motivations, an undefined generic setting, least bit of social marking

   3. The tragi-comic vein that dominates the absurdist theatre, the element of irony and ridicule toward the human condition

   4. The apocalyptic world, the motif of alienation and identity crisis (Clov, especially)

   5. The instability of power as in the subversive master-slave dialectic as in Hamm and Clov

   6. A vision of man cut off from his roots, the social place, his selfhood.

   7. The idea of meaninglessness as when Clov cracks a joke about the impossibility of the two of them starting to mean something.

   8. The endgame situation in a game of chess where it becomes impossible to finish the game.

   9. The absurdity of the parents, placed in ashcans.

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   Posted by kc4u on Monday November 9, 2009 at 10:03 AM