“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”
This bleak quote perfectly sets the tone for Beckett’s Endgame. Beckett’s apocalyptic nightmare world is full of waste, refuse, and is physically damaged and destroyed beyond recognition, the theme of trash is clearly treated in both a physical and more philosophical sense. Throughout the course of the play four characters Hamm and Clov, the blind master and dumb servant, and Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell attempt to simply exist and cope in the mess that surrounds them, questioning the worth of their existence in such a world. Performed for the first time only two years after Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, Endgame paints a yet bleaker vision of life that is ultimately meaningless and absurd.
Beckett proclaimed that the intellectual and artistic quest of his drama was to “to find a form that accommodates the mess” of the modern world. He clearly does not attempt to solve it, eschewing the role as social garbage man, nor does he offer judgement. Whilst doing this he questioned the very notions and conventions of theatre in a self-referential and meta-theatrical way. According to critic Brater, Beckett’s drama makes typical critical vocabulary and categories seem “tangential and inconvenient” due to his destruction of traditional dramatic conventions, an act of throwing out the old order.
One of the most striking and absurd images of the play (though as this is Beckett one must assume a base level of absurdity) is Nagg and Nell living in dustbins. The moment they peek out of their dustbins and see the mess around them, they instantly try to escape, instead, remembering the past as well as eating their existential dread away with biscuits, from the increasingly limited store cupboard of Clov. In this dystopia living in and among trash and waste is a physical reality, however some are literally left to rot in landfill. Nagg and Nell, are discarded as human trash in literal dustbins, feeling trapped in the final stages of their dismal and hopeless existences and the only mode of escapism from their misery is their imagination and reminiscing about the past.
Seeing this elderly tragi-comical relief duo emerge from the bins is both darkly funny and profoundly disturbing as “(Nagg knocks on the lid of the other bin)” the audience realises they are trapped there, unable to move themselves or escape the bin in which they inhabit. They are also treated like animals as Nagg asks “Has he changed your sawdust?” and their only way to physically remove themselves from situations is for Nagg and Nell to “(disappear into his bin, close the lid behind)”. However, whilst momentary delight is taken by the characters through stories, most notably Nagg and Nell who remember their romantic youth to affirm their love in the present, in his final soliloquy Hamm philosophises that “moments for nothing, now as always, times was never and time is over, the reckoning is closed and story ended”. None of the stories allow any of the characters real relief or reassurance as Nagg laments that his favourite comforts and people “no longer exists, we all know that, there is nothing in the world I love more.” This play is littered with reminders of a past that no longer exists, in a present promising only destruction and meaninglessness.
The only character who fully recognised that the game is over and is willing to just let it end is Nell. In her one scene alive she asserts “One mustn’t laugh at those things, Nagg. Why must you always laugh at them?”, shows her inability to cope through humour that shifts from the gravity of reality. She is the only character who actually physically dies, and whilst the others are dead inside the difference is distinct. Nell is a rare sympathetic character in both nature and audience perception, however, she has lost her ability to laugh, often an indicator of doom in Beckett’s theatrical world; he often links laughter with survival for “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”.
The aftermath of Nell’s death demonstrates the normalisation of death and the status of corpses as litter in a world where there are “no coffins” and it is not the norm to bury people. Beckett’s stage directions tell of Nell’s death, rather than words: (Clov stoops, takes Nell’s hand, feels her pulse.) … (Clov lets go her hand, pushes her back in the bin, closes the lid.) This pushing her back into the bin is a simple, brutal yet natural reaction when there is nowhere else for her to go. The way in which Nell’s death is talked about is unsurprisingly cold with Hamm asking “Have you bottled her?” and ordering Clov to “Screw down the lids” as it was “Time enough”. Physical matter ceases to be important, without the spark of life. The only human reaction is Nagg, who desperately (knocks on lid of Nell’s bin. Pause.) repeatedly shouting “Nell!” (Pause. He knocks louder. Pause. Louder.) before (Pause. Nagg sinks back into his bin, closes the lid behind him. Pause.). Nagg’s “crying” is Hamm’s primary reminder that he’s “living”.
Suffering is a key theme of Endgame, they all suffer whether it is physically, existentially within their own minds. This examination of suffering and wallowing in the ruins and rubbish of a society, as critic Swanson notes, “initiates a sociological commentary on the social dysfunction of passive compliance”. Suffering is the state of being in Endgame, yet no attempt is made, or presented as possible, to alleviate it. Beckett exemplifies this in Hamm’s line “I say to myself—sometimes, Clov you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you—one day”. The characters of Endgame suffer what Marxist critic Adorno classes as “the domination of nature which destroys itself”.
Beckett hands his characters repetition and memories of better times like a tool to try and fix an element of their broken psyche as it seems to be more of a soothing painkiller and preferable to the present chaos, rubbish and trash which dominates their world and their minds. However, the waste of both their surroundings and their lives is ultimately inescapable, the nihilistic force of Beckett ultimately dominates and suffocates.
