Ap English Language Essay

Samuel Beckett once said “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” The irony lies on the fact that words are necessary to explain that words are unnecessary. In Beckett´s Endgame, actions do not match those words. The play was originally written in French, and Beckett himself chose to translate it into English, hence there would be no mediators. We can then assert that all the words have been carefully chosen by the author. The absurdist plot is developed confined to a sober scenery, barely illuminated, and lacking of furniture. The only four characters are senseless; Hamm is incapable of standing, Clov is incapable of sitting, and Hamm’s parents, both lacking legs, live in containers and interact in a shocking

Playwrights had to explore this new reality through “physical embodiment of characters in stage” (Haney 1). In the case of Endgame, the only figures on stage are the four characters, Hamm, Clov, Neg and Nell, all of them with some unusual and disturbing feature for the audience’s expectations, such as living in a container or being incapable of sitting. Switching the focus from language to characters is one of the main strategies that Beckett follows, but he is still unusually interested in choosing the rights words to convey the anti-message, and thus become counter

This abstract yet analytical textual theory requires location, if we are to analyze cultural and social issues through this play. However, the possibilities are so numerous and the interpretations are so open that deconstruction does not provide a location, it does not specify a particular setting or timing. That is one of the problematic aspects of Endgame, not only physical location, but time and space as well. Clov claims that he sees “zero...zero...zero”, that there is nothing around. They are in some sort of limbo where Hamm, Nagg and Nell cannot leave. The only one who could provide a sense of location by leaving, which becomes a defining opposite, is Clov, and he is unable to even imagine. He only talks about death. For us, the audience, this is an absolute foreign concept. There is not a place in the world that we know like that. Plus, it becomes even harder to understand due to the fact that the play is totally atemporal. It could happen at any time from the invention of the dog toy on. There is nothing that can reliably set this play at any time and anywhere. Beckett does not make it necessary to know, the audience does not need to even wonder about it. It is not relevant. According to Derrida, this type of lack of information, mastered by this author, is basically a counter technique for