Pitiful Human Condition Exposed in Endgame, Dumbwaiter, and The Horse Dealer's Daughter

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Recommended: Analysis of endgame by samuel beckett

The Pitiful Human Condition Exposed in Endgame, Dumbwaiter, and The Horse Dealer's Daughter

The three stories, The Endgame (Beckett), The Dumbwaiter (Pinter), and The Horse Dealer's Daughter (Lawrence) all deal with the themes of repression, repetition, and breakdowns in communication. The stories show us the subjectivity of language and exemplify the complexities of the human condition.

Samuel Beckett arrived on earth in Ireland on Good Friday, April 13, 1906. He then spent the rest of his life wanting to be somewhere else. Beckett's life was one of silence, solitude, and depression. He felt he did not belong in this world and he was disenchanted with societal convention and the hum-drum existence that was everyday life. He lived in Paris for awhile and became good friends with James Joyce, another Irish writer disenchanted with conventional ways of life.

Becketts works reflect his complex views of language, silence, and the ineffectual capacity of both to convey human thought. In Beckett's ideology, "Language is useless" and "he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the inexpressible. His characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling on, endlessly."

Beckett's short story, The Endgame, is about four people in an underground room waiting for death. The end of the world has apparently happened and they have survived in what is presumed to be a bomb shelter. Two of the characters live in trash cans. These two characters are the parents of our main character, Hamm, who is himself confined to a whe...

... middle of paper ...

...he unconscious is the soul and all action should be from instinct. That is a scary thought!

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. "The Endgame", (online) http://samuel-beckett.net

Pinter, Harold. "The Dumb Waiter", The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1965

Lawrence, D.H. "The Horse Dealer's Daughter", (online)

"Samuel Beckett", (online) http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc7.htm

"Harold Pinter", (online) http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc28.html

Cliff Notes. "Harold Pinter - The Dumb Waiter"(online)

Prentice Hall, (online) http://wps.prenhall.com/hss_guth_disclit_3/0,5308,342140-,00.html

Nigel Harrison, Eastwood and D H Lawrence, (online) http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/nigel_h/dhl.htm

Randall Albright, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter", (online) http://clik.to/rananim/

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