End Game Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes
Cyclical, Repetitive Nature of Beginnings and Endings

Endgame's opening lines repeat the word "finished," and the rest of the play hammers away at the idea that beginnings and endings are intertwined, that existence is cyclical. Whether it is the story about the tailor, which juxtaposes its conceit of creation with never-ending delays, Hamm and Clov's killing the flea from which humanity may be reborn, or the numerous references to Christ, whose death gave birth to a new religion, death-related endings in the play are one and the same with beginnings. While Hamm and Clov are in the "endgame" of their ancient lives, with death lurking around the corner, they are also stuck in a perpetual loop that never allows final closureHamm claims he wants to be "finished," but admits that he "hesitate[s]" to do so. Just as death cannot arrive to seal off life, neither can Hamm or Clov escape to close the book on one existence and open anothernote Clov's frequent failed attempts to leave the room (and his final return after vowing to leave) and Hamm's insistence on returning to the center of the room. Nell's death may be an aberration in a play where death seems impossible, but since she is the one character who recognizes the absurdity of the situation, perhaps she is rewarded by dying. Several of Beckett's dramatic designs elucidate this notion of a circular existence. As mentioned above, Hamm has a compulsive need to return to the exact center of the room after Clov takes him on chair-rides. His oblique comments about the environmentbeyond the hollow wall in their hole is the "other hell"suggest an allusion to Dante's Inferno, another work that used images of circularity. And just as Dante's infernal images emphasize the eternal misery of its inhabitants, Beckett's characters are stuck in eternally static routines. They go through the "farce" of routine actions, as they call it, because there is nothing else to do while they wait for death. Even the environment around them is static; everything outside is "zero," as Clov reports, and the light, too, is forever gray, stranded between light and dark. Beckett also makes use of repetitions to underscore the cyclical stasis in Endgame. The play systematically repeats minute movements, from how many knocks Hamm makes on a wall and how many Nagg makes on Nell's ashbin to how many steps Clov takes. The repetitions prohibit the discernment of meaning, since there is never a final product to scrutinize. At the start of the play, Clov questions when individual grains become a "heap." In his view, the heap is "impossible"; any single grain is not a heap, and a "heap" is just an accumulation of single grains. When Hamm later considers how individual moments make up a life, the analogy should holdit is an "impossible" life, consisting not of a life but of discrete moments, until death terminates it. At one point, Hamm excitedly believes he is "beginning" to make some meaning out of the environment, but he will keep beginning to make sense of it and never finalize the meaning.
Emptiness and Loneliness

The constant tension in Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm or not. He threatens to and does sometimes, but he is never able to make a clean break. Likewise, Hamm continually tells Clov to leave him alone but pulls him back before an exit is possible. Both wonder out loud why they stay with each other, but both men give reasons in long monologues for why they put up with each other: their empty lives are filled only with unyielding pain, and none of life's typical consolations help themthere is no cure for being on earth, as Hamm often says. One of the unspoken themes in the play is that having someone else around, even an irritant, helps assuage that pain. But Hamm and Clov's unwillingness to face this pain alone somehow makes the pain greater, and their complementary, dominant-submissive pairing (a staple of Beckett's plays) highlights their numbing dependency. Beckett has compared Hamm and Clov's tense codependency to his own relationship with his wife in the 1950s; both wanted to leave the other, but were afraid to. Nagg and Nell have a happier marriage in part because Nell, at least, is willing to accept that they cannot rely on each other (she calls their futile kissing routine a "farce") and must exist in their separate ashbins.
Theatre of the Absurd

Beckett was one of the lynchpins behind the French theatrical movement called the Theatre of the Absurd. The Absurdists took a page from Existentialist philosophy, believing that life was absurd, beyond human rationality, meaningless, a sentiment to which Endgame subscribes, with its conception of circularity and non-meaning. Beckett's own brand of Absurdism melds tragedy and comedy in new ways; Winnie gives a good definition of his tragicomedy when she says, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness" (Beckett believes this was the most important line of the play). Self-conscious form in the theater was another feature of Absurdism, and there's no shortage in Endgame, from Clov's turning the telescope on the audience to Hamm's showy references to his own acting. But Beckett's self-consciousness is not merely for laughs. Just as the characters cannot escape the room or themselves, trapped in self-conscious cages, neither can the audience escape their lives for a night of theatrical diversion. Motifs
Chess

The "endgame" of chess is the series of moves at the end of the game, one whose outcome is usually decided before the formality of the endgame occurs. Beckett was a chess player and, in Endgame, parallels the chess conceit to the endgame of life, in which death is the inevitable outcome. The charactersor playersenact repetitive rituals that are part of their endgame. Like a losing player who strains through the final moves even though his demise is imminent, the characters make routines out of their lives and do whatever it takes to get through one more day, even though the game has lost whatever appeal it may have once had. Beckett constructs the chess motif with movements on stage. Hamm, who sometimes utters the cryptic line, "Me to play," is the King, the most powerful and yet the most vulnerable piece on the board. His movement is restricted, and he relies on Clov for protection in the center. Clov might be considered the Queen, as he can move better than anyone else, but his erratic, staggering gait is better suited to the L-shaped movement of the Knight. At one point Hamm alludes to Shakespeare's equine-bartering Richard III when he declares "My kingdom for a night-man!" Since the night-man replaces Shakespeare's horse the allusive pun recalls a chess piece's capture.
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Night-man (knight) takes knight. Nagg and Nell are relatively valueless Pawns, appearing only when the King allows it. Nell's death hardly disturbs him. The chess motif amplifies Beckett's vision of a repetitive, cyclical universe: the play ends with a stalemate, a game no one has won that will be played again tomorrow. Symbols
Light and Darkness

As is often the case in literature, light connotes life and death connotes darkness. Clov says he watches his light dying in his kitchen; the unseen character Mother Pegg died of lightdeprivation. Beckett's revises this somewhat clichd trope by making his Seasonal Affective Disordered (SAD) world gray. In this medium shade, the characters hold out minimal hope for life while despairing under death's shade. Hamm's blindness is another gray lampshade. He says he can feel the light on his face, and he cleans his glasses as if they were useful to him. His blindness also lends an extra level of selfishness to his refusal to give Mother Pegg his light.
Youth

The two young boys mentioned in the playthe boy in Hamm's story about the beggar and the boy at the end of the playfunction as symbols of regeneration. Hamm's story takes place on Christmas Eve, giving the sense that the boy, who may or may not be Clov (Beckett was ambiguous about this in conversation), is a Christ-figure. In fact, Clov's opening words echo Jesus's last words. At any rate, Hamm's story contrasts the withering state of the boy's beggarly father and the boy's youthful blooming. The boy at the end of the play is a more explicit symbol of regenerationClov calls him a "potential procreator." Hamm, of course, was also once a boy, the son of Nagg, but the Biblical Ham was the son of Noah. While Noah and his ark is a story of regeneration, Hamm's is one of sterility, and youth is further evidence that existence is cyclical and that Hamm will live forever in

Style
Beckett is known for bringing in a movement known as "minimalism" to both theater and prose. As we discuss in the "In a Nutshell," minimalism means that an author keeps word use to, well, a minimum, while trying to get the maximum significance out of what little dialogue there is. Beckett's dialogue, his short, clipped banter, is carefully crafted drafted over many times, each word chosen with care to say a lot in a little.

Words and Stage Directions Endgame's visual performance and self-reflexive dialogue constantly remind the audience that they are watching a performance by actors. Hamm broods: "All kinds of fantasies! That I'm being watched!" This tells the audience that they are part of the structure of the play, just as words, physical movement, lighting, whistles, dogs, ladders, windows, and silence play their roles. Beckett uses stage directions to create dynamic relationships between characters and the things they require to live: Hamm needs his armchair, and Nagg and Nell require their ashbins. Beckett creates a vivid physical world to complement the powerful and stripped-down dialogue.
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Beckett presents the characters' inability to understand through abstract language and stagnant dramatic structure. Beckett has stripped down and broken apart his words and sentences. Words are able to contradict each other and are often elliptic. Clov utters the first line of the play: "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished." By beginning the play with the word "Finished," Beckett directs our attention toward endings. As Beckett's characters search themselves and the world around them, language reflects the precarious balance between understanding and confusion. Beckett's Minor Plot Samuel Beckett's plots are notable for their lack of the classical dramatic structure. The minor plot line of Endgame is that of Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell. It is clear that they had a romantic love in their youth, but they now live in ashbins and are not well-taken-care-of by their son. The end of the play finds both Nagg and Nell dead, without having experienced much satisfaction throughout the play. Indeed, most of their interactions are attempts to recall their past happiness or to endure their current helpless situation. Theater of the Absurd Drama known as the theater of the absurd begins in the 1950s. Endgame, Beckett's first play after Waiting for Godot, continues in the tradition that Waiting for Godot established. TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
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Beckett is often considered a forerunner to the absurdist movement in theater. Read Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and David Mamet's Glengarry, Glen Ross, and write an essay on how you think their writing has been influenced by Samuel Beckett. Nagg and Nell, Hamm's parents, are in ashbins throughout the play. What comment does this make on society and our ideas and treatment of the elderly? Beckett's plays are filled with rituals. What rituals does Clov perform for Hamm, and what does this say about the master-servant relationship they are in? Endgame contains several elements of comedy. How do you feel these elements work in regard to the overall tone of the play? Why does Beckett make use of comedy in this manner? What is Beckett saying about life and the nature of comedy?

Endgame Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

Sometimes, there s more to Lit than meets the eye.

The Un-Symbol
Most people (us included) find Beckett to be a challenging writer. There is a big temptation to read his work as a metaphor and to ignore the physical realities that are a part of it. It's easier to just take away the gist of a Beckett play rather than focusing in on all those gritty particular details (of which there are a surprising number considering that Beckett is a minimalist).

To take but one example from the play: Hamm keeps his parents in trash bins. Symbol! Hamm treats his parents like trash. But notice, also, how Hamm's parents were in a bicycle accident where they both lost their legs. Now they have nothing but stumps. The trash bins are filled with sand for these stumps, and Hamm assigns Clov to change it from time to time. This is not just a symbol; it's meant to be real. The play is vivid and it is continuous, and it is chock-full of little details. This is not to say that there are no symbols in Beckett's work, but notice that every symbol ultimately comes back and ties us into the reality of the situation. Anyway, enough of that; let's talk about a few symbols.

It's like Genesis, but not

We get into the idea of Endgame as a game of chess in "What's With the Title?" Here, we are going to consider another way to think of the play as a whole. Think of it as the un-creation, as the opposite of the book of Genesis in the Bible. Hamm is playing God and is trying to bring the world back out of existence. Think we're full of hot air? Check out a few details:
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Hamm mentions that Clov's father was a gardener. Clov laughs at this. What is the first Biblical garden that comes to mind? Eden, right? Now, consider what happens when Hamm has Clov look out of the windows for him. One window is the earth and the other is the sea. This is similar to Genesis 1:9 when God separates land and water by saying, "Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so." Hamm also wants to know, "Is it light?" (1.632). This seems to echo Genesis 1:3 when God says, "Let there be light." Hamm speaks of his fellow men as creatures, and wants to know about the gulls and the horizon and the sun. Note that in Genesis 1:20, God says, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." Sounds similar, doesn't it? At one point, he wants to build a raft (like Noah's ark in Genesis 6-8) and go to see if there are other mammals. Note that none of these things actually exist in the world anymore. Something has gone horribly wrong with the creation story. Everything has come to an end. Consider how Hamm describes his situation: "Infinite emptiness will be all around you" (1.379). This sounds a lot like how Genesis 1:2 describes the universe before God created anything. ("And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.") It's as if the creation story is moving in reverse. Now, this all comes to a head at the end of the play, when Hamm gradually casts his different possessions away from himself and says that it is "good" each time that he does so. One can't help but notice that this echoes God's words in Genesis 1, in which God creates elements of the earth and following each creation, "God saw that it was good."

In the face of the apocalypse, Hamm is trying to un-make the world, to undo God's work; existence, for the characters in Endgame, is suffering, and Hamm works with symbolic gestures to try to bring it all to an end.

The Master-Servant Dynamic or the Superego and the Not-So-Superego

A great deal of the suspense in Endgame comes from Hamm and Clov's constant arguing. Clov repeatedly says that he will leave Hamm, but proves unable to do so. Hamm mistreats him, and in the middle of the play, we learn that Clov has probably been Hamm's servant since childhood. At two different points, Clov questions Hamm's authority. The first time: CLOV Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why? HAMM You're not able to. (1.454-455) And the second: CLOV There's one thing I'll never understand. (He gets down.) Why I always obey you. Can you explain that to me? HAMM No Perhaps it's compassion. (Pause.) A kind of great compassion. (1.745-746) In Endgame, the master-servant relationship is given center stage. The play, which is always on the brink of ending, is prolonged by the different ways that Hamm manipulates Clov and gets him to obey him. Without this master-servant relationship, the play would come to a halt (because Clov would bolt). A lot of people like to talk about how Beckett put a "state of mind" on the stage with his breakthrough play Waiting for Godot. No one had ever depicted "waiting" before. Now, if Beckett is putting a state of mind on the stage in Endgame, then what does that state of mind look like? We're going to pull in a bit of terminology from the good doctor Sigmund Freud to explain it. One of the ways that Freud modeled the mind was with the concept of the superego, the ego, and the id. Beckett was very familiar with this concept. The id consists of our base animal desires, and the superego is a bit like our conscience. Our superego is what tells us to act one way or another, to restrict our behavior in a certain way, but it is also the thing that always tells us that we are not good enough. The superego is the "boss." That leaves the ego, which is basically what we think of as ourselves. The ego is caught between the base desires of the id, and the bossiness of the superego. It is like a servant 6

with two masters. Enter Endgame. It's not too difficult to read Hamm as the superego. Hamm is, for example, the most complex thinker and the one that asks that they all pray to God. Then we can read Nagg as the id. In his very first line, Nagg cries, "Me pap!" (1.76) Throughout most of the play, he doesn't want much more than candy, attention, scratches, and kisses. That leaves Clov as the ego, the exhausted servant caught in between two masters: the ego and the id, instinct and idealism. He thinks to himself, "When I fall I'll weep for happiness" (1.794). Read this way, Endgame captures the interplay between the different parts of our minds, our cravings and our self-demands. Clov is our desperate attempt to keep everyone happy, to maintain balance and order. As he says, "I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust" (1.569).

Physical Disabilities
We've read pretty much everything that Beckett has ever written, and his characters' different physical handicaps still have us pretty confused. Consider what we have in Endgame. Hamm is blind and in a wheelchair. He gets headaches. Nagg and Nell have no legs, and they are unable to see each other. Nagg is hard of hearing. Nell is unable to cry. Clov has stiff legs and is unable to sit down. Why is everyone so physically impaired? There are plenty of explanations, but here's just one. When Clov says that there is no more nature, Hamm says, "But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals" (1.107). In the play, growth seems to be measured in terms of decay. Having a body seems to be a very undignified thing, and it brings all sorts of disgrace upon us. Now, consider the fact that, before James Joyce's Ulysses, the body was something that wasn't exactly celebrated in English 19th century literature. A writer like Jane Austen could appreciate beauty and good dress, but no one ever burps or passes gas or pees in one of her books. James Joyce violently broke this tradition in the English novel by introducing his hero, Leopold Bloom, as someone who poops and masturbates. The body is no longer something to be hidden: it's something to be celebrated. Now, Beckett, who was friendly with Joyce, takes this innovation and points out that it's not exactly a celebration. Our bodies fall apart. We get old, our skin wrinkles, and our hair falls out. In our minds, we imagine ourselves as being extremely dignified, but the body is something that can constantly undermine this feeling of dignity. By exaggerating this so strongly, Beckett draws special attention to the broken bodies of his characters. It is yet another aspect of their misfortune, something that they have to struggle against.

Endgame Setting
Where It All Goes Down

Hamm's House Post-Apocalypse

During a play any play, not just Endgame the characters are trapped on stage and forced to perform for an audience. Their space is confined. They are not free to move anywhere they please, and the result is that there are only so many things they can do. Sometimes, this limitation of action is underlined by putting a stage within a stage or a play within a play (see, for example, Shakespeare's Hamlet). Otherwise, we generally don't think of just how claustrophobic a place the stage can be. In Endgame, Hamm's room is the stage within a stage. In their post-apocalyptic situation, the characters are stuck in this room with just a handful of props (the gaff, the stuffed dog, the picture, the alarm clock) and they make use of each of them. Hamm constantly insists that they keep a dialogue going, if only to keep his spirits up. If the room is onstage, the kitchen corresponds to offstage, and it is the place that Clov can go to take a break and get away from Hamm. Like an actor, since he can't actually leave, he goes there. Critic Harold Bloom has raised an interesting question. If Endgame is a play within a play, what is the larger play that contains it? We'd like to turn that question around a little: if Hamm's room is a stage within a stage, what's the larger stage? What frames Hamm's room? The obvious answer is the theater itself audience members included. It is an eerie feeling that Beckett has produced, an uneasy feeling by which he gets his audience implicated in the action of the play.

Endgame Narrator:
Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him? Though all works of literature present the author's point of view, they don't all have a narrator or a narrative voice that ties together and presents the story. This particular piece of literature does not have a narrator through whose eyes or voice we learn the story.

Endgame Genre
Tragicomedy
First, let us just note that the entire genre of tragicomedy might best be summed up by Nell's line early in the play: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world" (1.194-196). The line contains the exact mixture of the morose and the comic that makes up the genre without quite explaining why unhappiness can be funny. Now, the play is undoubtedly and undeniably a tragedy. There's no getting around it. It takes place after 8

the end of the world. Everyone is dead except for four characters that are incredibly cruel to each other. There is, in fact, very little hope in the play. Beckett has imagined a situation in which things are already as bad as they can possibly get. What is more, the play ends on an ambiguous note. It's not even a decided tragedy. If Clov leaves Hamm, then Hamm and Nagg will die. And Clov will, too, out on his own. If Clov stays, then he simply continues to give in to the master who treats him so poorly. He simply prolongs their deaths a little longer. And yet Like Waiting for Godot before it, the play is tremendously funny. The characters never cease to search for ways to infuse their situations with humor. The comedy keeps the play from being so depressing as to be unwatchable. What's more, though, when we laugh with the characters, we are also relating to them, even in their extreme, exaggerated circumstances. Laughter is a way of drawing us, the audience, into the tragedy, forcing us to sympathize with these characters rather than just pitying them from a distance.

Endgame Tone
Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?

Ironic and Sympathetic

It's hard to attribute any specific tone to the play since there is no narrator, but there are a few things to note. Much of the humor of the play derives from irony, when the characters have attitudes that seem out of place with their situations. For example, there's that moment when Hamm and Clov discuss so calmly how Hamm will know if Clov has abandoned him or if Clov is simply dead in the kitchen. Their reasoned arguments just don't match the seriousness of what they are discussing. That said, the characters are always aware of the absurdity of their situations. We think that this might make it a more sympathetic ironic tone. An unsympathetic ironic tone would be one in which the author and the audience are aware of the irony but the characters are not; the characters aren't as bright as everyone watching them. In this play, though, they are pretty on top of things.

Criticism
Daryl Mcdaniel McDaniel is a writer with a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan. In the following essay, McDaniel discusses Beckett's Endgame. Samuel Beckett's writing can be something of a puzzle. There are no final positions or absolute interpretations. Endgame is, however, a unique masterpiece with an intricate dramatic structure that runs contrary to traditional theatrical structure.

Endgame was groundbreaking because it dared not to adhere to accepted dramatic rules. Beckett uses circular dialogue, refuses to accessorize the play or its characters with anything but the bare minimum, yet he creates a complex fictional and highly theatrical world for his characters to inhabit. Beckett chooses his words carefully, and the nature of the dialogue is circular, for example in Hamm's opening soliloquy: "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." The language Beckett uses demonstrates the precarious balance between cognition and bewilderment. The breakdown of language reflects the breakdown of the characters' ability to perceive the world around them. His use of self-reflexive dialogue informs the audience that they are sitting in a theater watching a play, alluding to the play as a "game." Just as the words Beckett uses are few, he removes all extraneous material from his play. Endgame's structure breaks from the theory that shaped centuries of dramas and tragedies. Aristotle wrote that tragedy is "an imitation of an action." Beckett is not concerned with trying to create and maintain an imitation or illusion of reality. Beckett strips bare all detail except the necessary minimum, and the detail he does provide is often vague. Beckett's use of dramatic motivation is also minimal. In traditional drama, a character's motivations are made clear to the audience, but the character's actions in Endgame are peculiar. One may wish to go to the theater to come away with conclusions and answers, but Beckett presents a fictional world as complex as the real world, where conclusions are uncertain and answers not easily defined. Endgame can be seen as the highest sort of theater, where events take place in the midst of the life of the audience, and it is the audience's responsibility to take what it can from what is presented rather than being force fed easily discernible plots. Despite flying in the face of recognized theatrical devices, there is an innovative dramatist at work, who decides to use chess as a way to play out this human predicament. Beckett uses chess as the play's controlling metaphor, and he explores the human dilemma, mortality, and God's existence, without providing simple answers, as his characters, and the audience, move through an uncertain existence. The game of chess becomes the metaphor that gives a seemingly structureless play a dramatic scheme. The characters in Endgame resemble chess pieces. The metaphorical king of Endgame is the center of attention, and the rules of chess apply to the characters, their setting, and their situation. In Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, Anthony Cronin writes: When it was produced in Berlin in 1967 Beckett told one of the actors, 'Hamm is a king in this chess game lost from the start Now at the last he makes a few senseless moves as only a bad player would He is only trying to delay the inevitable end He's a bad player.' WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
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Waiting for Godot (1953) is Samuel Beckett's best-known play about two tramps waiting for the elusive Godot. The Unnamable (1953) is the third novel of Beckett's trilogy, including Molloy (1951) and Malone Dies (1951). All three novels, which were originally written in French, are interior monologues containing flashes of dark humor. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) is another of Beckett's stage plays. It consists of a monologue in which the aged Krapp attempts to recapture the intensity of days long passed by listening to recordings of his younger self.
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Eugne Ionseco's play The Chairs (1958) is about a man who had opportunities to lead a great life but led a simple life with his wife instead. After many years, he decides to tell society his secret. The only characters in the play are the old man, the woman, and the person the old man hires to tell the world his secret. This play is a staple work of the theater of the absurd. David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross (1983) is an excellent example of the influence Beckett has had on the craft of writing plays. Mamet was highly influenced by Harold Pinter, to whom Glengarry Glenn Ross is dedicated, and Pinter was highly influenced by Beckett. Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1958) follows Stanley, an out-of-work pianist in a seaside boarding house. Stanley is mysteriously threatened and taken over by two intruders, who present him with a bizarre indictment of unexplained crimes. Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1997) is an ambitious and wellwritten biography of Samuel Beckett the writer, artist, and person.

And the audience can see the moves of the king once the game has been set up. Hamm and Clov can be viewed as king and knight, and Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, function as pawns. Beckett further emphasizes this by using two different colors to describe his characters. When introduced, Hamm and Clov both have a "very red face." Nagg and Nell both have a "very white face." Though his characters have two differing colors, they do not perform as contrasting pieces would in a standard game of chess played between two opponents. In chess, each piece is moved according to specific rules and is removed from the board when it is captured by the move of one of the opposing pieces into its square. The king is the focus of the game as each player tries to checkmate the other player's king. The king can move one square in any direction but only one square at a time and cannot move into check. Hamm, Endgame's crippled king, can only move with the aid of Clov, the play's knight, which ultimately leads to Hamm's demise. The move of the knight in chess resembles a capital L (two squares vertically followed by one to the side, or two to the side and one up or down). In literary lore, the knight is often the king's most ardent protector or deceiver. Beckett uses both of these ideas with Clov, who exists in a masterservant relationship with Hamm. Clov eventually leaves Hamm (if the audience believes Clov does leave at the play's end), which brings about Hamm's death. The least valuable of all the chess pieces is the pawn. Pawns can move only one square, straight ahead, except for its first move, which can be two squares straight ahead. It is the only chess piece that may never move backwards. Pawns have special privileges; other pieces do not. Beckett's pawns are of the sort that is unable to progress in the battlefield that is their shelter. Contained in ashbins, they are powerless to promote their own agenda and are trapped and dependent upon their son, Hamm. Hamm, the king, for the purpose of the drama, is the center of all activity. Hamm is all too aware of his limited mortal power and abilities, and he struggles to survive the chess game by trying to dominate the other characters on stage. Afraid of losing what little control he does have, Hamm tells Clov to take him for a spin around the room in his wheelchair. As Clov, the obedient knight in service of his king, moves him, Hamm complains about the slightest inaccuracy of his desired position and yells to Clov that he has moved him a "little too far to the left" or a "little too far to the right." Hamm tries to assert his dominance whenever he can. Beckett's purposeful use of chess as the play's central metaphor augments the dramatic maneuvers both Hamm and Clov contrive in their daily games with each other as they struggle with the purpose of going on at all.
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In his desperate requests for painkillers, Hamm creates devices that enable him to continue on for another day. Clov, on the other hand, exercises his love-hate relationship with Hamm by his committed performance of daily routines. Much of their dialogue implies an inner debate of each character vying for control of the other, such as when Clov asks, "Why do you keep me?" and Hamm answers, "There's no one else." Clov responds, "There's nowhere else." Hamm asserts, "You're leaving me all the same." Clov, answers honestly, "I'm trying." The king, knight, pawn scenario can also be seen at work when Hamm chastises his father, Nagg, when he comes out from his ashbin demanding food. Hamm whistles Clov in to feed Nagg, and then Hamm orders Clov to push Nagg back into the bin and close the lid. In the game of chess, pawns are typically the first to lose their lives, and so it is in Endgame. Both Nagg and Nell expire before the king; only the knight survives. The setting of Endgame has similar restrictions in time and space, as does chess. Endgame is set in a single room that may or may not be a bomb shelter after a nuclear war has devastated the earth. Beckett's characters exist in a world that seems to be coming to an end, and here the audience can see Beckett's characters' actions and ideas in comparison to an endgame in chess. P. H. Clarke notes in the translator's forward to Chess Endings: Essential Knowledge, by Y. Averbakh: Any deficiencies in positional judgment and technique which may have remained unnoticed amidst the complexities of the openings and middlegame are here ruthlessly revealed; errors stand out in greater relief and, what is worse, generally have more serious consequences. Beckett's characters know that the world and all of life outside their known shelter may have been destroyed they are aware of the serious consequences facing them, yet they feel somewhat safe in the small room they inhabit (the game space or game board). Hamm describes the world that exists outside the known shelter as an "outer hell." Like the king in a chess game, Hamm does not want to be taken off the game board, for if he is, he knows he has lost the battle. Thought and choice are the determining factors in any chess game. For the master player of chess, moves are planned in advance, and it takes time to set up strategy and position. The master player moves beyond tactics to strategy long-term planning in preparation for later action. None of Beckett's characters, like most people in real life, are master players. The chess metaphor is not simply an exercise but a way of coherently presenting the incoherent ideas of how humanity reconciles itself to itself. Just as the chess player is plagued by limitations, so are the characters in Endgame. Beckett's characters search for an understanding of themselves as Beckett explores human limitations and mortality all the while continuing to move towards the question of a person's significance in what may be a Godless world. Just as the king in chess can only move one space at a time, Hamm wonders why he is so limited. Through this game of chess Beckett examines the personal struggle and often the inability to understand one's own self. In looking to the future, the characters encounter a complexity of strategy and movement as real in life as it is in chess. Transformation can be difficult to pinpoint. Beckett does not provide easily defined dramatic moments when change does happen, and discernment is slippery at best. Clov describes a change that has occurred without completely understanding what precisely has transpired:

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Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes. I don't understand, it dies, or it's me. I don't understand, that either. I ask the words that remain sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say. Hamm also acknowledges this phenomenon: "Absent always. It all happened without me. I don't know what's happened." Just as a bad player in chess suddenly finds the endgame and potential victory slipping from his grasp, so do Beckett's characters. As the endgame begins to slip from grasp, the characters' thoughts fall to mortality. The characters in Endgame realize that they are mortal. The repetitions and routines throughout the play represent the habitual nature of man and imply that these habits are palliative to our awareness that death is certain and life mysterious. The characters discuss what may give life meaning and make it worth living. Experience in life should add up to a meaningful existence. Clov, in the second line of the play, describes what should be the accumulation of experiences that produce meaning: "Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap." This idea is again articulated by Hamm near the end of the play: "Moment by 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." In examining their lives thus far, the characters, and the audience, must determine their futures. For Clov, the decision is to take his chances in the "outer hell," leaving the safety of the only playing field he has known. As Clov prepares to leave Hamm, Hamm admits defeat. Hamm throws his worldly possessions towards the audience and places his handkerchief over his face, an act of the king giving up the game. Despite his eventual loss, throughout the play Hamm desires personal significance. Beckett's play culminates in the most universal question of all: is there a God and do we matter to Him? Beckett asks the audience to consider if God does exist or if he is a myth made up by man to allow man to ease his fear of death and his fear of insignificance. In one scene, Hamm orders both Clov and Nagg to pray to God, but Hamm cries in agony, "The bastard! He doesn't exist!" Hamm and the other characters solemnly question the existence of God. One of the comedic moments of the play is when Nagg and Nell discuss the joke about an Old Jewish tailor who took more than three months to make a decent pair of trousers, the results of which were more satisfactory than God's six-day effort to create the world. Beckett raises these questions, but he does not provide easy answers. For the believer, perhaps Beckett is saying that only God has complete knowledge of the world and that human ideas are limited. Such is not the case for Hamm, who seriously doubts the existence of God. Hamm says that it would seem impossible for the millions of moments in a lifetime to amount to anything significant. Do any actions or relationships in life bring anything but pain, suffering, and insignificance? In Beckett's work, one cannot take things at face value. Each person must rise to Beckett's challenge and search himself or herself for the answers and solutions to these universal and timeless questions. The fact that Beckett finds an unconventional yet successful way to address these weighty questions of life in an hour-and-a-half play is what distinguishes it as great drama. Beckett succeeds by exploding the paradigms of traditional drama. He uses allusions to, and forms resembling, chess in order to create structure where there initially seems to be none. Beckett treats his audience with the utmost respect by investigating the human condition without

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allowing for the hope of an absolute answer to life's biggest puzzles. Beckett's Endgame, though a labyrinth in its complex construction, is an extraordinary work of twentieth-century art. Source: Daryl McDaniel, Critical Essay on Endgame, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003. COMPARE & CONTRAST
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1950s: The United States and the Soviet Union are split over Middle East loyalties and support. Fear of a nuclear war increases. Today: The United States and England engage in war with Iraq. The United States wages war on terrorism throughout the world. North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, and the potential for nuclear war again seems all too possible. 1950s: Russian scientists launch Sputnik into orbit, initiating the space race between the United States and Russia. Today: Beginning in the 1990s, Russian cosmonauts worked together with American astronauts on the space station Mir. The United States and Russia continue to have cooperative working efforts in space exploration and research. 1950s: Eugene O'Neill is posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Long Day's Journey into Night. Today:Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks wins the Pulitzer Prize for drama. 1950s: Albert Camus receives the Nobel Prize for literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times." Today: Imre Kertsz (Hungary) receives the Nobel Prize for literature "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

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