Themes in Beckett's Endgame

Endgame has the theme of 'End' and 'Finished'. The opening line of the play has a word 'Finished' and the very word is repeated throughout the play several times. Beckett tries to clarify the idea that beginning and ending is inter-wined. The worst thing for him is to take birth and the best is to have death.


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He has the escapist mentality and all his characters also suffer from same mentally. While Hamm and Clov are in the endgame of their lives with death surrounding them, they are stuck in a never ending loop that never permits final closure. Hamm claims he wants to be finished, but at the same time admits that  he hesitates to do so. The death cannot arrive to stop the life totally, in the same manner, Hamm and Clov cannot close the chapter of life and start another. We can take the instance of Clov, who frequently fails to leave Hamm and returns. At the end, even after vowing to leave, he cannot exit from the room. He threatens Hamm many times, but he never makes a clean break. Hamm also continuously tells Clov to leave him alone, but pulls him back too soon. They cannot say why they both are living together and why cannot leave each other.

 Beckett’s characters are stuck in eternal static and motionless routine life. They go through the ‘farce’ of set actions of life, and they call it because there is nothing else to do while waiting for death, an ultimate escape. Even the environment around them is static, everything outside is zero and the light which is the only hope of life is also too dull and gray.

Their empty lives are filled with unspoken pain and none can console each other. One of the themes of the play is that having someone else around, even irritant and unfriendly helps to soothe the pain.

Another striking important theme is an absurdity. From the beginning to the end of the drama, alienation, meaningless, futility and nothingness have dominantly been presented. The  setting that symbolizes skull of the dead man, the minimal actions, the minimal dialogue and conversation, use of monosyllabic words, use of words or lexicons that just refers to finishing, death and end all are the salient features of absurdity. Beckett in his play ‘Endgame profoundly uses these features and caters the theme of absurdity.