Notes on Endgame (Part 1)




Adapted from Cultural Mecca: One of the most unique and powerful voices of the Twentieth Century, Sameul Beckett 
was born in Foxrock, Ireland, in 1906, and suffered, as he claimed, an eventless childhood. He attended Trinity 
College in Dublin, and left for Paris when he was twenty-two (he would later call this city home). In Paris he fell 
in with a group of avant-garde artists, including James Joyce, who was to become a life-long friend. Although he 
continued to write in both English and French throughout his life, most of his major works were written in 
French between 1946 and 1950. Beckett was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1969. He died in Paris in 1989.      

Beckett's bizarre world is explored in novels, short stories, poetry, and scripts for radio, television, and film. 
But he is best known for his work in the theatre. His most famous play, Waiting For Godot, opened at a 
tiny theatre in Paris in 1953 and went on to become one of the most important dramatic works in this century. The 
strange atmosphere of Godot, in which two tramps wait on what appears to be a desolate road for a man who never 
arrives, conditioned audiences to following works like Endgame, Happy Days, and Krapp's Last
Tape.      

Beckett's drama is most closely associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. He employs a minimalistic approach, 
stripping the stage of unnecessary spectacle and characters. Tragedy and comedy collide in a bleak illustration 
of the human condition and the absurdity of existence. In this way, each work, from the lengthy productions 
(Waiting for Godot, Endgame) to the very brief (Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe) to the despairing 
mologues (Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue), serves as a metaphor for existence and an entertaining 
philosophical discussion. Although Beckett dissociated himself from the post World War II French existentialists,
his works cover much of the same ground and ask similar questions. 

Adapted from Arts and Leisure:  Samuel Beckett's 1957 apocalyptic one-act wonder Endgame (originally 
written in French with the title Fin de Partie), is still an amazing thing to watch. For our pleasure, Beckett 
constructs a desperate, hopeless landscape on the brink of annihilation. Nothing, not even a good, hard prayer, 
can save his four pathetic characters from doom and despair. There is no God. There is no happiness. Every day 
is an awful routine with the same extended farce, the same bickering cruelty, the same all-encompassing  
selfishness and stupidity.  

On stage, windows and doors and alarm clocks float in black space. A couple  of old folks live in trash cans. 
A blind guy in a wheel chair screams endlessly  for pain killers that he's never going to get. A humpbacked servant 
slouches in a 10-foot-by-10-foot-by-10-foot cell, staring at the wall, waiting idiotically for his master to whistle 
him. Every character is filthy, dim and unlikeable. There is no dignity here.   No one except Beckett could create 
such a world and make the experience of observing it so enjoyable and stimulating. The play is almost 
overwhelmingly bleak--probing the failure of the imagination, the drudgery of life, emotional  manipulation, 
callousness, hypocrisy and the terror of death--but it also doles  out more than its fair share of laughs. 
Despite the blackness and pessimism,  Beckett somehow manages to keep it all entertaining. As one of the trash 
bin people says, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," and Beckett's play proves the theorem with precision.   








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