[In the following essay, Kumar argues that the chess symbolism in Endgame serves as a unifying element for the play as well as a metaphor for existential uncertainty and despair.]

Samuel Beckett's drama depicts a relentless search for the central self¹ or the ultimate being which remains unidentified, unseen and unattainable. Time makes this search an unending process by presenting the seeker with the illusion of being static and at the same time creating a flux, making the distinction between illusion and reality blurred. The central self which eschews the seeker is often presented in Beckett's works as a non-existent entity. In Waiting for Godot the central self that the tramps could never get at is presented as the enigmatic Godot.² Alain Robbe-Grillet observes that “Godot is the inaccessible self.”³ In Watt this non-existent central reality takes the form of Mr. Knott, who never makes his appearance and who is continuously sought out.⁴ In the course of this futile search, man is caught within the infinity of Time, and bewilderment at the nature of Time finds its expression in such telling phrases as Vladimir's “Time has stopped”⁵ or Hamm's “time was never and time is over.”⁶ Thus an “Infinite emptiness” binds their lives, as Hamm says in Endgame (109).

In Endgame the struggle with Time itself is delineated through a central metaphor: the game of chess. That chess is the central metaphor in Endgame is more acknowledged than analysed. Benedict Nightingale reports that Beckett himself “told the Hamm in a German production” of the play that Hamm is “a king in a chess game … trying to delay the inevitable end.”⁷ Despite such a pertinent comment from Beckett himself, the chess metaphor in Endgame still remains to be fully explored. A careful analysis of that metaphor is essential for a fuller understanding of the multifaceted concerns and the varied levels of meaning that mark the play. This essay proposes to argue that the chess metaphor in Endgame functions as a unifying element, linking the other symbols with it and integrating movements and decor in the play, and, in the process, presents the existential angst of man, through the uncertainty and unpredictability of the last phase of a game of chess.

Beckett views the centre of existence as a void or nothingness which continuously eludes absurd man. Failure is imperative in man's journey towards nothingness: “the attempts of the individual to define himself by fixing his position within the void must be regarded as failures.”⁸ The chess metaphor in Endgame presents this quest for, and movement towards, the non-existent central reality which is, in fact, nothingness itself.

The game of chess has been one of Beckett's “abiding passions”⁹ and has exerted a seminal influence on Beckett's works, ranging from the cursory reference to the “unfinished game of chess with a correspondent in Tasmania” in Rough for Theatre II to the subtle and complex employment of chess as a symbolic device in Murphy and in Endgame.¹⁰ A. Alvarez remarks that Beckett's dream world is “the world of chess.”¹¹ In Endgame, with paradoxical dexterity, Beckett turns the rationality of the game of chess into the irrationality of the Absurd. Like the diverse squares in the chequered board, the world is strewn with numerous systems of thought. Each system, whether it be philosophical, religious, materialistic, or aesthetic, is represented by a square. But no system is absolute; no system shows the central or eternal reality. And the chess board is devoid of a central square. That is, there is no such position on the chess board which a chessman can occupy and which is the absolute centre of the board. There is no centre, or, in other words, the centre is a void, nothingness, which is the seat of the central self or the ultimate being.

For Beckett, a game of chess reflects life itself. Referring to the chess metaphor in Endgame, Valerie Topsfield notes that the “action of the play has an affinity with the repetitive, defensive play at the end of a less-than-perfect chess game which is a metaphor for life.”¹² But the game of life, unlike a game of chess, is quite irrational. Man is a being tossed in the absurd universe like a piece on the chess board, and his fate is as dubious as that of a chessman. He may be checked or thrown out of the board at any time in the perilous game of life: “It is, of course, clear that the fate of chessmen is, to Beckett, analogous to the fate of man.”¹³ So the best course to be adopted is to avoid the game; that is, not to make any move at all. Or, if one is to make moves, one must try to retain all the chessmen in the initial position. Beckett himself played such a game with Geoffrey Thompson, according to a biographer, and it is reflected in the game of chess in Murphy. Beckett's concept of the ideal game of chess emerges from the anecdote as follows:

Beckett argued and then tried to demonstrate that once the pieces are set up on the board, any move from then on will only weaken one's position, that strength lies only in not moving at all. The ideal game for Beckett was one in which none of the pieces were moved, for from the very first move, failure and loss were inevitable.¹⁴

Beckett employs the chess metaphor for the first time in Murphy, and the game of chess there has made its impact on the later dramatic works, Endgame in particular. Murphy, like the other heroes of Beckett, is a victim of Cartesian dualism.¹⁵ He finds his absolute freeing into nothingness after the game of chess he plays with Mr. Endon, an inmate of the sanatorium where Murphy works as a male nurse.

Beckett gives an account of the game Murphy plays with Mr. Endon, detailing all the eighty-six moves leading to Murphy's surrender. Beckett regards the first move of Murphy's as the “primary cause of all White's subsequent difficulties.”¹⁶ He should not have made any move at all. But Murphy makes his moves to reach the non-existent and unattainable centre of the board. Though he tries to imitate the moves of Mr. Endon, he is quite unable to follow his opponent who tries to retain the original positions of his chessmen. On the twenty-seventh move which Beckett describes as the “ingenuity of despair,”¹⁷ Murphy tries to tempt Mr. Endon by making his queen an easy prey for Mr. Endon's pawn, but his opponent pays no heed. His only endeavour is to achieve the initial position. On the thirty-fourth move of Mr. Endon, Murphy's king is actually in check, but he ignores that opportunity too. By the forty-third move, Mr. Endon's pieces have come almost to the initial position except for the king and two pawns. With the next move, he could have brought the king, too, to the initial position though he will not be able to bring the pawns to the initial position for the technical reason that pawns cannot be moved backwards in chess. But before that, Murphy surrenders; his chessmen remain “scattered about the board in utter chaos,”¹⁸ the ultimate fate of the man who makes the move. That night Murphy gazes into Mr. Endon's face, when he comes to an awareness of his own being and existence. He returns to his room and sits in his rocker where he feels “… astir in his mind in the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash” (141), like the white and black in a game of chess. As the gas leaks, leading Murphy to “superfine chaos,”¹⁹ he attains his “ritual rock into Nirvana” nothingness.²⁰

Murphy plays the game in the intervals between his duty, and Mr. Endon and he do not see each other as they make the moves since each “made his move in the absence of the other. …”²¹ This aspect further orients the game as a metaphor of life, a game of chess with the unfathomable force of Time in the absurd universe. In such a game the player and the pieces are often identified, both are in the same miserable plight, which is highlighted in Endgame.

There is no fixed time for a game of chess to conclude; the time taken is indefinite, with the ending perpetually delayed. The first move in a game of chess is analogous to birth, which existentialists view as a forcible ejection into the world, like the man in Act without Words I who is “flung backwards on stage”²² to play the game.²³ In a game of chess the white has to make the first move. Mr. Endon, who has a deeper insight into life, never plays with white, he plays only with the black. His zeal to return to the initial position could be seen as the urge to return to the womb which Beckett often presents in his plays by making his characters take the “foetal posture” as does Estragon in Waiting for Godot.²⁴

Murphy has many subtle links with Endgame. The play's dialogue opens with Clov's recital of Christ's last words on the Cross: “Finished, it's finished.” (93). It is curious that “while a theological student he [Murphy] had used to lie awake night after night … pondering Christ's parthian shaft: It is finished.”²⁵ The setting of Endgame suggests the inside of a skull, the locus of brain, and chess is a game of the intellect. This setting has another significance. Referring to Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot, at the end of which he repeats “the skull the skull the skull the skull,”²⁶ G. C. Barnard says that the skull is the “image for man's ultimate fate, the end product of his wasting, pining, shrinking and dwindling.”²⁷ The skull-like setting is integral to the action of Endgame which enacts the last-ditch phase of the search for the ultimate self and the process of dying.

Ruby Cohn has provided the fullest account of Beckett's advice to Ernst Schröder, the actor who played Hamm in Berlin in 1967.

Hamm is a king in this chess game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves. That he will make no progress at all with the gaff. Now at the last he makes a few senseless moves as only a bad player would. A good one would have given up long ago. He is only trying to delay the inevitable end. Each of his gestures is one of the last useless moves which put off the end.²⁸

Yet Hamm seems not only to be a mere chess piece; he is the player too. The very first words he utters are “Me—[he yawns]—to play” (93). Michael Robinson points out that “… Hamm is both player and chess piece, to be exact the threatened king.”²⁹ That Hamm is both player and king is further assured by Clov's inability to resist his orders:

CLOV:
Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why?
HAMM:
You're not able to.
CLOV:
Soon I won't do it any more.
HAMM:
You won't be able to any more.

(113)

Hamm implies that Clov is not able to defy his orders though soon he will be unable to obey him. Hamm here refers to the end of the game when the king will be checkmated so that the other piece left, Clov, loses significance. As Hamm is the player too, Clov cannot but obey him, since the pieces are moved at the player's disposal. Realisation of this dual existence of Hamm as the player and the king is essential to the understanding of his plight and the play as well in the existential context. It makes Hamm a true existential hero, who is both the actor and the sufferer. He is fully responsible for his actions or the moves he makes.

Hamm is aware of the futility of the game he pursues, which, in fact, is a metaphor for man's confrontation with the greatest enemy in his search for the self: Time. Michael Robinson says that Hamm's “opponent is not human but time and against the latter one seeks to lose, to be eliminated into Nothing.”³⁰ That Hamm is trying to delay the inevitable end is evident from his first speech: “And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to … to end. Yes, there it is, it's time it ended and yet I hesitate to—[he yawns]—to end” (93). The game with an adversary who is beyond Hamm's ken and mettle turns out to be a lingering trauma. Hamm, as a blind man who plays chess, is dependent on Clov, and he is also a split personality. Being blind, he falls short of making the moves in accordance with the conception of his mind. His is essentially a Cartesian plight; non-coordination between mind and body makes him an inept and grotesque player in the game with “a relentless opponent who has seized each advantage and stripped the board.”³¹ As player, Hamm represents the mind; as a chess piece, the body. Hamm, as king is unable to comprehend the strategies of Hamm, the player, and this, together with his blindness, aggravates his inability to cope with the game. The split between mind and body is evident when he says that the game has been continuing without his full awareness of it: “Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don't know what's happened” (128).

The structure of the play also enhances the chess metaphor. In the first draft, Endgame had two acts, but Beckett later adopted the one-act structure.³² Beckett seems to have dispensed with the two-act structure to present the play as one long, continuing action so that the chess metaphor is evoked in a clearer light. A break would have ruined the titular metaphor.

This game of ending has been continuing, on and on, with recurring moves. But on the day on which the action of the play takes place, there is some sort of a change in the moves. Something strange, some unprecedented move on the part of the opponent is threatening Hamm's existence and is accelerating the slow game toward its finale. Hamm has a premonition of this even at the beginning of the action:

HAMM:
Apart from that, how do you feel?
CLOV:
I don't complain.
HAMM:
You feel normal?
CLOV:
[Irritably] I tell you I don't complain!
HAMM:
I feel a little queer.

(94)

So there is some change from the usual repetitive moves. This makes Hamm anxious at the way the game is getting on:

HAMM:
But that's always the way at the end of the day, isn't it, Clov?
CLOV:
Always.
HAMM:
It's the end of the day like any other day, isn't it Clov?
CLOV:
Looks like it.

(98)

Hamm is eager to make sure that he is making the right moves. But the oddity of the moves on the part of the opponent is making him more and more anguished, and his inkling of some unexpected move of the enemy is soon assured:

HAMM:
[Anguished.] What's happening, what's happening?
CLOV:
Something is taking its course.

(98)

So something is taking its course; though Hamm, at present, is unaware of the real moment of that move. But the endgame of existence also seems to them as having a repetitive pattern:

HAMM:
[Gloomily.] Then it's a day like any other day.
CLOV:
As long as it lasts. [Pause.] All life long the same inanities.

(114)

The events seem to have the same pattern as the moves in a game of chess. Yet within this pattern there is an enigmatic variety which is flabbergasting. As no two games of chess are likely to have the same moves, so the next move, the next astounding moment of life, lies beyond Hamm's expectation and that is why he is anguished. He is completely overcome and baffled by Time at the end of the play when he exclaims, “Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over.” (133).

The relentless game with Time and the slowness of the last moves are hinted also through the reference to Zeno's heap. Clov says in the opening speech, “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (93). Hamm later echoes Clov's words, which are more revealing: “Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of … [he hesitates] … that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life” (126). Hamm has been trying to get at the seemingly impossible culmination of the game. The endgame of his existence continues without mounting up to a life, and is getting more and more slow and tiresome as it moves towards its terminus. As Michael Robinson puts it: “… the closer the heap approaches to completion, the slower it actually increases.”³³ In all probability, the final moves in a game of chess take much time or get slower; each move needs much forethought and the player has to take into account the consequences before the piece is actually moved. Thus, the reference to Zeno's impossible heap may also suggest the end of the endgame which is continuously delayed. Hamm is aware of the fact that the endgame of his existence or the act of dying is getting very slow. Getting checkmated in the game of life is indeed slow; as Hamm says: “This is slow work” (97).

The long awaited endgame with Time is indeed irritating. When Hamm, exasperated by the conversation of Nagg and Nell, asks them to stop, he is not merely referring to their talk: “Have you not finished? Will you never finish? [With sudden fury.] Will this never finish?” (103). Hamm seems to imply that the last phase of the game will never cease. He refers to the game later, too, as “this”:

HAMM:
Do you not think this has gone long enough?
CLOV:
Yes! [Pause.] What?
HAMM:
This … this … thing.

(114)

Yet Hamm's only aim has been to prevent or to delay the inevitable end. He has sacrificed many a piece during the course of the precarious game with Time, to save himself from being checkmated. Two such pieces are directly referred to in the course of the play, an old doctor and Mother Pegg:

HAMM:
… That old doctor, he's dead, naturally?
CLOV:
He wasn't old.
HAMM:
But he's dead?
CLOV:
Naturally. [Pause.] You ask me that?

(104)

Clov's query, with the emphases on “you” and “me” suggests Hamm's responsibility in this piece's captivity and its subsequent disappearance from the chess board. Similarly, Clov accuses Hamm of having denied Mother Pegg oil, thus causing her death due to “darkness” (129). Again, Hamm refers to the other pieces which he lost in his attempt to delay the ultimate failure: “All those I might have helped. [Pause.] Helped! [Pause.] Saved. [Pause.] Saved!” (125). His urge to save himself and thus delay the end is more evident in his anxious insistence on the position Clov should take. Whenever Clov is behind his chair, Hamm is deliriously anxious of his safety: “Don't stay there [i.e., behind the chair], you give me the shivers” (105). Again when Clov is behind his chair Hamm expresses the same frenzied anxiety: “[Clov closes the window, gets down, pushes the chair back to its place, remains standing behind it, head bowed]. Don't stay there, you give me the shivers!” (124). He wants Clov to be beside him, as a shield, to prevent himself from being checkmated.

Ending the game by surrendering, like Murphy, would be just like leaving the chess board of existence: “Outside of here it's death” (96). Paradoxically, remaining on the board and continuing the game would also lead to no other end but death. Hamm is slowly approaching the end as if he were in a blind alley. Hema V. Raghavan notes, “He [Hamm] has reached, so to say, a cul-de-sac analogous to the stalemate in a game of chess.”³⁴ Hamm and Clov as pieces in a game of chess, the stage being the chess board, have no existence outside the board. Beckett emphasizes this fact:

HAMM:
Gone from me you'd be dead.
CLOV:
And vice versa.

(126)

It is true that if Clov, the knight, is taken away from Hamm, the king, that is, from the chess board itself, he is dead. At the same time, Clov is the lone piece left for the king's protection. So the capture of the knight by the enemy would be detrimental, for it would make the process of checkmating the king rapid.

The anxiety over the unforeseen changes in the moves of the opponent becomes more and more apparent towards the end of the game. The strategies of Time seem to have a menacing finality and so the game may be approaching its end. Hamm realises that he will be checkmated soon, and that it will put an end to Clov's intention to leave him: “You won't be able to leave me” (115). This premonition of the imminent defeat is later made clear:

CLOV:
Do you see how it goes on.
HAMM:
More or less.
CLOV:
Will it not soon be the end?
HAMM:
I'm afraid it will.

(122)

But Hamm is resolute to go on with the game. As he is destined to play the game with Time, he will continue it:

CLOV:
[Imploringly.] Let's stop playing!
HAMM:
Never!

(130)

Time, the greatest obstacle in the search for the self, keeps Estragon and Vladimir endlessly waiting and it incarcerates Winnie of Happy Days.³⁵ Hamm's case is more hazardous as he is forced to play a game of chess with Time.

Beckett presents the existential anguish of man confronting the absurd, by depicting Hamm's centripetal quest. When Clov moves Hamm's armchair round the shelter, Hamm insists on bringing him back to the centre. He seems to have a frantic desire to be at the exact centre:

HAMM:
Am I right in the centre?
CLOV:
I'll measure it.
HAMM:
More or less! More or less!
CLOV:
[Moving chair slightly.] There!
HAMM:
I'm more or less in the centre?
CLOV:
I'd say so.
HAMM:
You'd say so! Put me right in the centre!

(104-05)

This insistence to be at the exact centre is later repeated, towards the end of the play. When Clov moves Hamm's chair and searches for the telescope for the final observation of the world around the shelter, Hamm expresses his angst in being away from the centre:

HAMM:
[Anguished.] Don't leave me there! [Angrily Clov restores the chair to its place.] Am I right in the centre?

(129)

Hamm's quest to be right in the centre, which is the locus of the ultimate self, will remain unfulfilled. That he can never be in the exact centre is hinted when Clov again tries to put him right there. Hamm is aware that he is not in the exact centre as Clov moves his chair in all directions. As a chess piece, Hamm cannot occupy the central position:

HAMM:
I feel a little too far to the left. [Clov moves chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far to the right. [Clov moves chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far forward [Clov moves chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far back.

(105)

These movements are similar to the moves of a chess piece in the four central squares of the board.³⁶ The quest for the central self in the absurd world is like Hamm's movements in his attempt to reach the unattainable centre. Yet man is fated to search for the ultimate self and is thereby subjected to endless suffering.

The futility of his endeavour is hinted earlier to Hamm by a mad painter. Hamm, calling on him in the asylum draws his attention to the rising corn, the herring fleet, and all the loveliness outside. But the mad painter can see only “ashes” (113). This lunatic is the counterpart of Mr. Endon in Murphy, who makes Murphy realise the futility of making moves in the game of existence only to incur uncertainty and angst. The mad painter seems to have realised that beyond all external beauty and abundance, the true mark of the world is “ashes,” which suggests the vanity of all human endeavour. When Clov surveys the outside he finds everything gray, the colour of ash:

CLOV:
[Looking.] Grey. [Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.] Grey! [Pause. Still louder.] GRREY! [Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.]
HAMM:
[Starting.] Grey! Did I hear you say grey?

(107)

Hamm is now in a situation, as if the world has come to its end, which the mad painter had earlier prophesied.

During the course of the endgame, Hamm relates the story of a man who comes begging bread for his child on a Christmas eve (116-18). Hamm refers to his story as “chronicle” (121). Stanley Cavell says that the word “chronicle” “suggests that it is a record of fact.”³⁷ Looking at the story in the light of the chess metaphor, helps to understand it better and to provide a probable answer to John Fletcher's query: “[I]s Clov the little boy whose father came begging Hamm for food one very bad year?”³⁸ It is said in the play that the man “came crawling” (116), which suggests the slow movement of a pawn. A pawn reaching the eighth rank in a game of chess could be promoted to powerful pieces like knight, bishop, rook, or queen. The man says that he left his child “Deep in sleep” (118). The deep sleep may refer to the inactive state of a chess piece other than a pawn, removed from the chess board, which may return onto the board if a pawn reaches the eighth rank. So the child in deep sleep may be a knight already captured by the enemy. The man, after Hamm agrees to take him into service, asks one more favour: “In the end he asked me would I consent to take in the child as well—if he were still alive. [Pause.] It was the moment I was waiting for” (118). Why should Hamm await the moment when the man would ask him to take in his child? He might have been waiting for the opportunity to move the pawn to the eighth rank, to bring the knight which is a more useful piece, back into the game. Concluding his chronicle, Hamm says that the man was “glaring at me with his mad eyes, in defiance of my wishes” (118). The man wants to be with his child, yet why should he glare at Hamm in defiance? Hamm, the player, can resurrect the knight from deep sleep and bring it back to the game only by moving the pawn into the eighth rank. So, as the knight is taken back onto the board, the pawn has to leave it, once again causing their separation. The man is forced to move into the eighth rank, resulting in the return of the knight, Clov. The “odd[ity]” of Clov's carriage, as Hugh Kenner remarks, reminds one of “the Knight, which moves angularly.”³⁹ It is said in the play that Clov came into the shelter when he was quite small:

HAMM:
Do you remember when you came here?
CLOV:
No. Too small, you told me.
HAMM:
Do you remember your father?
CLOV:
[Wearily.] Same answer.

(110)

As Clov makes his last survey of the world around the shelter, he sees a boy outside (130). Clov proposes to go out with his gaff, evidently to exterminate the boy. But Hamm prevents him and says that the game has reached its finale: “It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more” (131).

The boy's appearance gives the suggestion of queening in a game of chess.⁴⁰ The boy may be “an enemy pawn crawling towards the backline to become a Queen.”⁴¹ That is why Clov calls him “[a] potential procreator” (131), a pawn which would bring the queen back into the game. Hamm prevents Clov from assaulting the boy as it is beyond the powers of the lone knight to capture or block the queen, the most powerful piece in chess. That is why he says that he does not need Clov anymore. As Michael Robinson suggests, Hamm seems to be “in check from the boy.”⁴² The ending of the game is further assured early in Hamm's final speech: “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing” (132). “He tries to move his chair, using the gaff (132), but ‘gives up’ his attempt to move and throws away the gaff” (132-33). The stalemate situation is now over, and the king is actually checkmated. So Hamm “covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless” (134). Clov remains at the door, “impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on HAMM, till the end” (133). This ending of the play is also suggestive of the ending of a game of chess. Hamm remains unmoving in his chair when he is checkmated as “the king is never removed from the board as are the other pieces when captured.”⁴³ Clov cannot make his exit as his relevance as a chess piece and his ability to move come to an end when Hamm, the king, is checkmated. The millet heap of time has reached its completion and the endgame of existence terminates as futilely as it began. In one of Beckett's own production notebooks his “note on the beginning of the play reads ‘C[lov] perplexed. All seemingly in order, yet a change. Fatal grain added to form the impossible heap.’”⁴⁴

To sum up, Beckett deftly presents the existential concerns of the play through the central metaphor of chess. The irrationality of the Absurd is conveyed through the moves in the endgame when the king is perpetually under the threat of being checkmated. Caught within the bewildering intricacies of the game, Hamm experiences the anguish of man confronting the Absurd. His search for the central reality is marred by the uncertainty created by the unprecedented moves of Time. Hamm tries to seek out the unattainable locus of the central self which is symbolically delineated through the non-existent centre of the chess board. The absolute reality he strives to seek out is something that does not exist or that is simply absent; and so he is anguished. This quest of Hamm metaphorically reveals the angst of man in the absurd world where all his endeavours incur pain, frustration, and failure. The non-existent centre of the chess board symbolises the void at the centre of being, as envisioned by Beckett. The essence of existence is a void or Nothingness. The chess metaphor in Endgame is, thus, a metaphor for the murky chaos of human existence rooted in absurdity.

Notes

1. See Martin Esslin, “Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self,” The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed. (London, 1980), 29-91.

2. See Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragi-comedy in Two Acts, in The Complete Dramatic Works (1986; London: Faber, 1990) 7-88.

3. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre,” trans. Barbara Bray, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965), 110.

4. See Samuel Beckett, Watt (London, 1963).

5. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 36. See note 2.

6. Samuel Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act, in Complete Dramatic Works (1986; London, 1990), 133. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

7. Benedict Nightingale, A Reader's Guide to Fifty Modern British Plays (London, 1982), 274-75.

8. Peyton Glass III, “Beckett: Axial Man,” Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot: A Casebook, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, 1987), 75.

9. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London, 1990), 233.

10. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Theatre II, in Complete Dramatic Works (1986; London, 1990), 242; and Murphy (London, 1977).

11. A. Alvarez, Beckett, 2nd ed. (London, 1992), 17.

12. Valerie Topsfield, The Humour of Samuel Beckett (London, 1988), 109.

13. Bair, 234. See note 9.

14. Ibid.

15. “Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind” (Murphy 64). See note 10.

16. Ibid., 137.

17. Ibid.

18. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (London, 1973), 69.

19. Murphy, 142, See note 10.

20. Hugh Kenner, “Progress Report, 1962-65,” Beckett at 60: A Festschrift (London, 1967), 71.

21. Murphy, 106. See note 10.

22. Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I: A Mime for One Player, in Complete Dramatic Works (1986; London, 1990), 203.

23. A. J. Leventhal, “The Beckett Hero,” trans. Barbara Bray, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965), calls this a game “between a psychotic and a neurotic.”

24. Waiting for Godot, 43. See note 2.

25. Murphy, 44. See note 10.

26. Waiting for Godot, 43. See note 2.

27. G. C. Barnard, Samuel Beckett: A New Approach: A Study of the Novels and Plays (London, 1970), 96.

28. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, 1973), 152.

29. Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (London, 1969), 264.

30. Ibid.

31. Kenner, Reader's Guide, 127. See note 18.

32. Beryl S. Fletcher and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, 2nd ed. (London, 1985), 91-2.

33. Robinson, 262. See note 29.

34. Hema V. Raghaven, Samuel Beckett: Rebels and Exiles in His Plays (Liverpool, 1988), 34. Stalemate refers to the situation in endgame when the king can make limited moves, only to get checkmated.

35. See Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts in Complete Dramatic Works, 135-68.

36. These movements in the four central squares could be figuratively represented as 1 indicates “far to the left”; 2 “far to the right”; 3 “far forward”; and 4 indicates “far back.”

37. Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett's Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, 1976), 142.

38. John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett's Art (London, 1967), 144.

39. Kenner, Reader's Guide, 126.

40. Queening is the process in which a pawn reaching the eighth rank is replaced by the queen.

41. John Fletcher and John Spurling, Beckett: A Study of His Plays, 2nd ed. (London, 1978), 80.

42. Robinson, 265. See note 29.

43. J. A. Cuddon, The Macmillan Dictionary of Sports and Games (London, 1980), 211.

44. James Knowlson, “Beckett as Director: The Manuscript Production Notebooks and Critical Interpretation,” Modern Drama, 30:4 (1987), 455, quoting Samuel Beckett, manuscript notebook prepared for the San Quentin Drama Workshop production of Endgame at the Riverside Studios, London, in May 1980, Reading University Library Ms. 1975.