Endgame: The Game We Play

In chess, endgame refers to an ending in the game where the outcome is already known. It is the final move of the game; the end of the game. There is a direct parallel between endgame and the final stages of life. In the game of life the endgame is death, and no matter how you play the game the final move always results in death. Everyone will die eventually and there is no way around it; in every chess game there will be an endgame.

In Beckett’s Endgame a main theme seems to be the finishing of things. The opening lines of the play in fact are about things being finished. “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” Clov makes this statement at the start of the play, not at the end where it would be most expected. This could be because that to finish something for good would mean death.

In the play the only character that dies is Nell. She is therefore the only character that is able to escape from the world and end her game of life. The two main characters, Hamm and Clov, are unable

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Clov has many chances to leave Hamm and many reasons as well, but he simply does not leave. At one point Hamm asks Clov why he does not just kill him.

This play seems to be Beckett’s answer to the question that we have all asked at some point or another. It seems as though all outside objects, that is to say all objects that are independent of a person, have vanished and no longer exist. The idea that this is a play within a play makes one think about this quote from Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women in it are merely actors”. They need one another, and cannot survive without each other. In other words they have to live life remembering the meaning of things and knowing that the meanings no longer exist. So, Clov and Hamm are left to live life with nothing but their consciousness, memory, and desire left. Hamm and Clov seem to be the only people left in the world, and the world seems to be quite a dreadful place to be. That would explain why people fear them both equally and more than just about anything else that there is to fear. This is because everyone dies. I haven’t accomplished endgame just !

yet. Both characters, like most people, seem to fear death as much as they fear the thought of being alone.

Endgame also seems to be a play within a play. This meaning that the characters seem to be going through their lives as if they were characters in a play.

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