Existential Crises in Endgame

Throughout a ridiculous play such as Endgame by Samuel Beckett, it's difficult sometimes to find exactly what the point of everything is.  The dialogue and action of the play can sometimes be hard to parse and usually seems completely inconsequential, but after looking very closely the point shines through the nebulousness of this play.  Samuel Beckett simply uses Endgame as a medium to vent his existential thoughts about the meaningless of life, something that we all struggle with from time to time.  Although many people believe that this play is garbage and a waste of time to read, ultimately the play makes the reader consider the afterlife and what they believe about eternity.

Unlike most conventional literature, Endgame throws us right into the middle of the plot with no backstory, no introduction to characters, nothing.  The audience is denied any expectation of a linear plotline or any of the other elements of a story they've been trained to recognize.  Instead they now have to make something for themselves out of a story mostly consisting of two lovers living in separate trash cans and a man moving a ladder back and forth.

However, there's no point to this random action for a reason.  All of the characters are just waiting to die, wasting their time with trivial actions.  Even the characters feel as if they're living for nothing, as multiple characters in the play question why they continue living.

CLOV:

Why this farce, day after day?

HAMM:

Routine. One never knows.

(Pause.)

Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.

CLOV:

Pah! You saw your heart.

HAMM:

No, it was living.

(Pause. Anguished.)

Clov!

CLOV:

Yes.

HAMM:

What's happening?

CLOV:

Something is taking its course.

(Pause.)

HAMM:

Clov!

CLOV (impatiently):

What is it?

HAMM:

We're not beginning to... to... mean something?

CLOV:

Mean something! You and I, mean something!

(Brief laugh.)

Ah that's a good one!

The quotation above shows that the characters have little hope about what their point in life is.  They sit around with nothing to occupy their time, and we, as readers, get upset with this.  We start to feel uneasy because this breaks the social construct that everything should have a point to it.

But to Beckett, everything is meaningless.  Throughout the entire play, even evident in the quotation above, there's just inconsequential action. The heart Hamm sees is completely irrelevant to the play, but it's included to show us how little things in life contain no meaning, and that by extension, life has no meaning.

This play challenges the traditional beliefs about afterlife because Beckett's entire point of the play is to show that life doesn't have any meaning.  Although his point is obvious, many readers struggle to allow a play to prove to them that life has no point and try to deny it.  Since a fact as heavy as that can't necessarily be proven to anybody and nobody wants to believe this, the play raises questions like this to the audience and makes us consider these possibilities regardless of whether we want to or not.