Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Plays

" It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."

—Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett has been known to write plays about nothingness. Over the years of Beckett's work being produced, he has gotten mixed reviews of confusion and shock at the apparent lack of plot and conventional theatrical tropes. Most of audiences at the time of the play's original production were expecting to see theatrical pieces that followed in suit with Victorien Sardou's theory of well-made play—a standard of the theatre for the time—borne out of the arguments found in Aristotle's Poetics (Esslin #). Beckett, in many ways goes against the traditional conventions of this expectation in the theatre, going so far as to eradicate some of them entirely. A myriad of Beckett's theatrical plots follow a single trajectory—they lack the first and foremost important element of tragedy, defined by Aristotle as having a clear beginning, middle and end, along with an "incentive movement" which "[starts] the cause and effect chain," eventually leading to a climax and dénouement. Instead, most of Beckett's characters are following a singular, indefinite and endless action that is, in the end, cyclical: the characters are left no better and no worse by the end of the play. Interestingly, though Beckett's characters are left heavily undefined, the vagueness of each lends them some, but not all, of Aristotle's requirements. The characters cannot be classified as definitely "good or fine" or showing "fitness of characters" as there is no plot of consequence to test their substance of character. And yet, there is reason to believe that Beckett's characters could be considered to be...

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...pple. Krapp's Last Tape is a reminder—or even perhaps a warning— to audiences that life cannot be relived. In order to avoid living life on a spool, one must realize that humans are limited in living forward and thinking backward. There is no way to interrupt the natural progression of life by attempting to change what is recorded half way through. Krapp's Last Tape reminds audiences that even in the endless cycle of fast forwarding and rewinding your "spool of life" and Krapp's continual attempts to grasp onto something tangible, moments of importance and beauty have existed. There meaning in the nihilistic void can be as little or as much as you make of it. We are comforted, as an audience, to know that we can be empowered to conjure up any meaning we choose—or any number of meanings at that— if we realize that, in the end, our choice will be meaningless anyway.