Looking forward to doomsday

vedley

May 07, 2026

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!

You could use the above quote as evidence that Beckett wrote this play to be intentionally bereft of meaning, though this time, I found it to be a latchkey for the entire work. Endgame is a kissing cousin of Godot. While that is a play that constantly paces in circles, desperate to begin, Endgame attempts instead to futilely distract itself from the inevitability that it must conclude. Somewhere in this flow of stasis, trapped in a body of work that runs its course without its characters' input, is Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead. It's a wonderful triptych if that's how you wish to take it.

Hamm is a storyteller, attempting to chisel meaning out of a dried-out and infinitely grey existence. And I don't just mean in his literal tales; this desperate search for something extends to mundane dialogue, his harassments of Clov (are you sure nothing has changed out there, won't you check again?, etc), and his desperate sputters that close the play. Clov, meanwhile, is essentially a slave, bound to every word of Hamm's (as Clov makes sure to mention time and again), though he remains insistent that he cannot stay forever. His movements are deliberate and jagged, and, when Hamm has no need of him, he stands in the kitchen and stares at the wall.

You can move in a million directions with this all. My high school literature professor was very hot on the notion that this is all a parable of the human search for meaning, which is a completely sound and altogether logical takeaway from most of Beckett's absurdist theatre. This time, I smelt a little autocritique in the air. If you take Hamm to be Beckett's darkened Prospero, a wisened wizard orchestrating the drama from within, traded for a blind near-corpse desperately trying to turn an empty procession into drama, I think you'll see what I mean. Beckett sends his characters off into an empty world in the hopes that they will bring back a meaning he cannot find, but they are tied to him. They would not even exist if they were to leave. Maybe this is about the human search for meaning, or maybe it is about Beckett's own. Maybe it is about how he orchestrates little stories of empty-eyed dolls to play out his own frustrations with a universe that cares nothing for him, and that the act of doing so has made him only more maddened at the emptiness of the void he spends so long staring at. Why won't something happen? Why is the only surety that it will stop? Why does it feel, sometimes, like, in this process, a spark of truth is discovered? That, to quote directly, "Something is taking its course," that it's all beginning to mean something? Why does this pursuit of the unknown so frequently feel like its own answer? If it is not him, then it is at least the act of creation itself that looms over the work; the euphoric rush alluded to, and the dulling refractory period acting as backdrop.

My copy of this play is a secondhand paperback I picked up in a dusty salerack a year or so ago. The cover looks as though the top was run into by an extremely small bus, and the insides betray that it was once owned by an attentive though still green high school literature student. They, whoever they are, with their pink highlighter and their loopy calligraphy, might as well have been reading a different play to me, and that's not an insult. They latched on to the abusive paternal dynamic of Hamm and Clov, and found themselves flummoxed by the introduction of Nagg and Nell, who, if anything, serve entirely to complicate easy social readings of the relationships between characters. I noticed that notes were becoming more sparse the further in I read. The play made this person's lens work for their take. They found no satisfying way to interpret Nell's death, taking the events of the play at relative face value. I have no easy answers for them (you'll notice I have little idea what to do with Nagg and Nell myself), but I hope they eventually chewed through to something that works for them. It was nice to have a reading buddy.