Endgame - Blog Post 4

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a frustrating and difficult read. Deriving a “so what?” answer from it required deep analysis and insight. At the surface the audience views the lives of the four characters as bleak and meaningless, waiting on their impending deaths. Within the characters existed a preoccupation with death and the idea of a cyclical existence. I believe that the point of this play is to undermine the search for a meaning of life by arguing that life is meaningless and is merely a repeating cycle that we live through. Clov and Hamm seem to be living there lives monotonously, repeating a daily cycle of tasks that merely get them through the day as they wait for their lives to end.

Hamm: I’ll give you nothing more to eat

Clov: Then we’ll die.

Hamm: I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You’ll be hungry all the time.

Clov: Then we won’t die.

Lines 75-79

This conversation depicts the preoccupation with death that Hamm and Clov display throughout the play. Clov expresses his conflicting feelings on death as he seemingly complains about both living and dying. Audiences in the 21^st century most likely read this play as it challenges the idea that life has meaning. The question of the meaning of life has been around since the beginning of time and will be a question may never be answered as we are living on this Earth. From this play we can learn that we should become less preoccupied with the thought of death. The characters in the play live a bleak and gloomy life partly due to the fact they are constantly thinking about death and how their lives are meaningless. The audience should take away from this play that in order to live a better life you should have goals that enhance you as a person and live a life worth living. One should do what they love to do even if it is a monotonous task performed daily.