Fin De Partie, Endgame
(Beckett, Samuel)
The set of Endgame resembles a skull, with two high windows on the left and right. This is a play about hell: hell in the head as well as that state that might be awaiting us.
Everything is grey. There is no colour anywhere. At centre stage sits Hamm, in a chair on casters, with a bloodied handkerchief covering his dead. At left, two garbage cans covered with an old sheet. Clov stands at the right, next to a door. A picture hangs on the wall, face to the wall.
The garbage cans contain Hamm?s parents, Nagg and Nell, legless and helpless. Nell dies about two-thirds of the way through the play. Clov is Hamm?s servant, and there is constant tension between the two of them as Clov wants to leave but cannot. There is no yesterday or tomorrow, as they are all locked into an eternal now, although they all refer to wistful memories.
There is a marked ?sense of ending? in the play; the word ?end? occurs at least nine times in the text and is of course picked up in the title. Hamm is like a decrepit king surrounded by a diminished court. This is King Lear taken to the extreme. He is playing an endgame of chess against the fates, and he is losing. Beckett described Hamm as ?a bit of a monster?the remains of a monster?.
Such action as there is constitutes time filling, and all the characters (with the exception of Nell, who is beyond caring) are waiting for something, though they have no idea for what. This is the human condition stripped to the bone.
Beckett?s is a hell far removed from Dante?s: a sordid bed sit rather than an apocalyptic Inferno. Something is better than nothing, which is what these characters have. It is a hell without god or devil, where the torture is in empty repetition of pointless actions, of not knowing: a hell for our times, indeed.
Resumos Relacionados
- Fin De Partie, Endgame
- Fin De Partie
- Fim De Parte (fin De Partie)
- En Attendant Godot - Waiting For Godot
- Waiting For Godot
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