John Calder has estimated that, if the present production of books continues unabated, Beckett will by the year 2000 rank fourth behind Jesus, Napoleon, and Wagner among the most written about persons in the world! While it is understandable that the puzzles of this very puzzled man would provoke such a plethora of books and articles, it is rather ironic that a writer who is "at home on the path of silence" would command such a talkative audience. (p. 5)

Beckett is not fully appreciated as what he is: a player. Persons who have noted the element of play in Beckett have tended to construe play as merely one dimension among others in Beckett's vision. A more adequate reading locates in "existence is play" the foundational metaphor of his entire literary cosmos. (pp. 5-6)

Playing … is the principal strategy by which Beckett's people establish existential meaning, however ephemeral and truncated, in a time when all inherited paradigms of meaning have dissolved into nothingness. Shuttled against the collapse of what Beckett terms the "teleological hypothesis" as legitimation for existence, Beckett's characters find a way of continuing a-telic play…. Through play, his characters go on after the old structures of meaning have paled into insignificance and before new structures—e.g., Godot, the self, the end—have appeared. Whether these new structures of human significance will emerge is a moot question in Beckett's world; what is important is that play provides a modicum of meaning in the mean-time. (p. 8)

Play in Beckett's world combines within itself several important dimensions which, while separable to the analytical eye, function integrally in the literature itself. On one level, play involves turning from the circumstances which circumscribe one's normal life situation…. [Divertissement] is the way of turning from (di-vertere) an insufferable situation. (pp. 8-9)

While the diversionary dimension of play activity is important in Beckett's literature, we should not forget that play has an important temporal dimension as well. In play one leaves the burden of ordinary time and enters into a different temporal framework in which things have their meaning, not within the chronos of clock-time, but in terms of the kairos of the play world. (p. 9)

Having no action to provide content to the temporal horizon of existence, [Beckett's] characters find in play a means to structure and to pass time. (p. 10)

The activities of both Watt and Malone are mere pastimes which provide a minimal structure to temporal existence, much like the simple tick-tock of the clock.

Malone … brings to our attention a fundamental characteristic of all play activity when he acknowledges that he counted "for no reason, for the sake of counting." In contrast with other forms of activity, play is distinctive in having no purpose outside the doing of the activity itself. (pp. 10-11)

[In] Beckett's literature "existence is play" is an expansive metaphor, bringing within its purview all activities which the characters initiate. It is not a matter of some activities being play in Beckett's world and others not being play; it rather is a matter of seeing all activities as if they were play. In his study of Proust, Beckett comments that "the Proustian world is expressed metaphorically by the artisan because it is apprehended metaphorically by the artist."… So it is with Beckett: the artisan (the craftsman) expresses his world through the metaphor of play because the artist (the seer) apprehends his world sub specie lūdi.

This vision of things means that finally in Beckett's world the primary model of the self is that of player. In what we might term a psychosocial dimension, Beckett's characters typically understand themselves and their relationships with others in terms of play. With regard to self-understanding, it is important to note that whatever fragile identity Beckett's characters have is secured through make-believe. This motif, which emerges at many points, is especially prominent in the trilogy, where the artist-heroes relentlessly search for self-identity through assuming various roles. The characters which populate the fragments of stories in the trilogy are personae which the narrators assume in a attempt to arrive at some response to the question of self-identity…. Sapo, Malone, Macmann, Mahood, Worm, Molloy are fictions invented by a character seeking to understand himself; they are epiphenomena hovering above an internal Other that is unable to coalesce and to be with psycho-ontological stability; they are ploys in the game, Who am I. (pp. 12-13)

Beckett's use of "Unnamable" to designate the final narrator of the trilogy signals an admission that the internal Other cannot emerge into the light as a stable identity, but must remain unnamed in the depths, unable to be born and unable to die. With the model of the self as player, Beckett suggests that the particular formulation or name with which we attempt to capture the self is inevitably inadequate. If one says that he is Molloy, then he immediately senses a component of himself that is not Molloy. If one masquerades as Moran or Malone or Watt, then he becomes painfully aware that aspects of the self lie beneath these appearances. The self is ever receding beyond the names with which we attempt to establish it in secure identity. All we know about the self is the disguises that it assumes, the masks with which it confronts the world, the lies which it tells itself and the world.

For all the intensity of self-excavation which Beckett's literature commands, Beckett's characters finally are not solitary players. They typically have companions with whom, and for whom to play. One form of their playing with and for others involves the notion of theatrum mundi. Hamm is a principal manifestation of this type of play…. Much like Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Hamm's existence is that of a ham-actor, who performs invented roles in lieu of a more authentic life to live. (pp. 13-14)

In seeing the psychosocial dimension of play in Beckett, it is important to distinguish between playing with another person so as to enjoy his presence and to sympathize with his distress, and gaming with another so as to exercise victimizing power and to gain unfair advantage. The first of these patterns of relationships is more closely aligned to the companionship of Vladimir and Estragon who, while they bicker and insult each other, are nonetheless compassionate fellow-sufferers who assist each other to endure through the long waiting period. In contrast, the relationships which obtain between Pozzo and Lucky and between Hamm and the other characters in Endgame tend more toward a tyrannous control without special concern for the suffering of the other. (pp. 15-16)

[Beckett's people] are not only playing; they are played. Play emerges as something which is done to or through the characters, not merely something that they do. This suggests that play is in Beckett a metaphor with ontological import…. The play motif moves in the imagination of Beckett from a metaphor by which to construe ordinary time-structuring activities, to a metaphor by which to understand the self and its relationship with others, to a metaphor by which to picture the nature of reality itself. Reality in Beckett's world shows itself as play, and play is that in which Beckett's characters are implicated by virtue of the primordial "sin of having been born."… (p. 16)

The brief drama Play is … helpful in our seeing the ontological dimension of play. The characters speak only when they are provoked by the spotlight. As the fourth character in the play, the light relates to the others as victimizer to victim, as inquisitor to defendant, as eye to object. The characters envisage themselves as involved in a process which they hope will end when the light hears what they may be concealing; or when the light sees what it desires to find; or when they themselves relinquish the desire to understand their plight. Just as the characters see their previous lives as play, so do they understand that they presently are involved in the play of the light…. The light is at play, and the characters are contained by that play. They are in the play of the light. (pp. 16-17)

It matters little whether that which plays with man is imaged as God, or time, or Godot, or death, or meaning, the result is the same: Beckett's characters are the playthings in a game the rules of which are beyond their control.

Several elements of Beckett's literature reinforce the impression that play is an ontological metaphor of the type I here suggest. The first is the presence of several allusions to the Tantalus mythologem, which is the structural and thematic basis of the mime Acts Without Words I. The dramatic tension which propels this brief mime and the tension which keeps Vladimir and Estragon returning to the stage each day is the tension that resides in the realm between expectation and accomplishment, promise and fulfillment, anticipation and actualization. The Tantalus mythologem, which has the same tensive components, may well be Beckett's "representative anecdote" of the human condition, for it gathers together disparate motifs and visualizes in pristine form the fundamental nature of man's situation in Beckett's world. And that situation is one in which man is the plaything of a desire, or a force, or a being, or a situation against which he cannot prevail. (pp. 17-18)

The play of reality is at times like the play of Vladimir and his friend Estragon—genial, surprisingly compassionate, comically amusing; but the play of reality is also like the play of Pozzo with Lucky—cruel, fickle, destructive, angry. The vision is that of Plautus … "In strange ways the gods make sport of men." All the dimensions of play come into sharper focus when we realize that a vision of reality as at play informs the entirety of Beckett's world. The simple diversions and time-passing activities, the multiple roles of the self, the image of social relationships as playing—all these are grounded in the prior ontologic vision of all reality as at play.

As is always the case, one's ontology predetermines his espistemology, hence we should not be surprised to discover that Beckett explores the epsitemological dimensions of a play vision of reality. Watt is the paradigm for this dimension of play…. In form and content the composition is epistemological gamesmanship, for the fundamental question of Watt is What. Through intricate and humorous cerebrations, often involving ridiculous permutations and combinations, the protagonist attempts to make sense of the baffling world of Mr. Knott (not, knot)…. Watt futilely persists in the game of knowing, despite the continual alteration of the reality which he is attempting to know. The exercises of logic, deductive and inductive, rational and empirical, while not giving a final understanding of the reality at play, do provide a temporary surcease of questioning…. The existence of man and the final nature of reality remain shrouded in mystery, as much concealed as revealed in the game of knowing. (pp. 19-21)

Parodoxically, Beckett plays against language, attempting to do something that words intractably will not do: he seeks to speak and yet to say nothing. If playing is doing nothing, then writing, when viewed as play, must attempt to say nothing.

In this attempt to render writing as a form of play, Beckett moves art toward abstract painting in which the pictorial images are severed from representational significance; he edges his art toward music in which the delight is not in referential meaning, but in the playful relationships among sounds in time. (p. 21)

Instead of playing tricks with language as did the early narrators of Beckett, the narrators of the trilogy are tricked by language into saying things they do not wish to say…. Words do things to Beckett's narrators: they keep them in conscious existence; they cause them to say something when they wish to say nothing. The only way to avoid being the plaything of language is to move, as Beckett does in his later fiction fragments, toward silence. (pp. 23-4)

His art is not merely about people who play, nor is it about a vision of play: his art takes the form of play in order to speak a vision of play. We find in the circular construct of Godot and Play the finely chiselled form of a game which can be repeated over and over; in Endgame we discover the structure of a chess game in which the gradual attrition of pieces brings the game to the tensive moments just prior to the checkmate; in the trilogy we see the amorphous, unpredictable shape of solitary play in which all the rules of standard game-forms are dysfunctional. In Beckett, as he observes of Joyce, "Form is content, content is form…. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." Beckett's writing is not about play; it is play itself. (p. 24)

Ted L. Estess, "Dimensions of Play in the Literature of Samuel Beckett," in Arizona Quarterly (copyright © 1977 by Arizona Board of Regents), Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 5-25.