“Is it not time for my pain-killer?”: Endgame and the Paradoxes of a Meaningless Existence

Authors

  • Fernando Aparecido Poiana

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v13i0.3627

Keywords:

Endgame, Samuel Beckett, aesthetic

Abstract

This article analyzes the nonsense and violence embedded in the very “logicality” of language in Endgame, and how this aesthetic mechanism
creates an entropic universe in the play. It also focuses on Beckett’s insistence on the vagueness of temporality, on habit and on human memory as products of constant repetition which transfigure the reified empirical world of History into the aesthetic realm of this play, whose central axis revolves around an absurdly repetitive stasis. This repetitive stasis triggers the characters’ gloominess in face of their impotence to break free from their farcical and cyclical repetition of beginnings and endings.

Author Biography

  • Fernando Aparecido Poiana
    Fernando Aparecido POIANA graduated from IBILCE, UNESP (The State University of São Paulo), and took the 2007 Fall term at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, where he focused his studies on Modern British and Irish Literature and Interpretive Theory. He has conducted research on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and is currently taking a Postgraduate Certificate course in Advanced English Language and Literature at IBILCE, UNESP.

References

Adorno, Theodor. “Trying to Understand Endgame”. In New German Critique, Spring/Summer 82 Issue 26, 119-150.

Beckett, Samuel. “Endgame”. In Samuel Beckett The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006, 89-134.

Berensmeyer, Ingo. “‘Twofold Vibration’: Samuel Beckett’s Laws of Form”. In Poetics Today, Fall 2004, Vol. 25 Issue 3, 465-495.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990.

Haney, William S. “Beckett Out of His Mind: The Theatre of the Absurd”. In Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002, Vol. 34 Issue 2, 39-53.

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Seelig, Adam. “Beckett’s Dying Remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts”. In Modern Drama, Fall 2000, Vol. 43 Issue 3, 376-392.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: an Aesthetic of Redemption. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.

Worton, Michael. “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: theatre as text”. In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 67-85.

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Published

17-11-2011

How to Cite

Poiana, F. A. (2011). “Is it not time for my pain-killer?”: Endgame and the Paradoxes of a Meaningless Existence. ABEI Journal, 13, 61-68. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v13i0.3627