66
RICHARD GILMAN
The result of
all
this is that we find it difficult t o "identify " ,
with the tramps, and this will be true as long as we wish them to
be traditional protagonists carrying forward an active narrative full
of recognizable events to a point of resolution and summing-up.
We have to see them as figures provisionally outside time and
cumulative circumstances, placed on stage in order to show us
what being on earth, beneath social fate and personal distinctive–
ness, is like. As Buechner made Woyzeck into an embodiment of
pure oppressed creatureliness, the victim as hero, Strindberg split
his characters into faculties and impulses, and Chekhov kept his
three sisters immobile so that their truthfulness as survivors might
be seen - - all blows at dramatic rules and rubrics -- so Beckett,
in
the most far-reaching revolution of all, deprives his characters of
a story and an ending in order to demonstrate how we wait for
these things, how the waiting is our bitter, comic task.
Yet the demonstration is no abstract exercise but a form of
invented life, and this life at the extremity moves us deeply in
ways we could not have foreseen. We have not had these emotions,
for we have not knowingly lived this existence; but we recognize it
now. There are moments in the play of great poignancy - - it is
the wrong word, but this is Beckett, in which no word is ever
quite "right" -- when we fully intuit the mysterious, unexampled
humanity of the entire work and are moved to tears through our
laughter. Perhaps the deepest of these occasions is when the boy
appears at the end of each act with word that Godot will not come
"today." "What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?" he asks them once.
Didi's reply contains the essence of the longing, the uncertainty
and painfulness of this clown show, this juggling act in stricken
space: "Tell him ... (he hesitates) .. . tell him you saw us."
If
such categories as optimism and pessimism pertain at all to
Beckett, then
Endgame
is much more pessimistic than
Waiting for
Godot.
In its seedy room whose windows look out on empty
ocean, the living world seems to have been narrowed down to four
survivors: Hamm, who cannot see or stand; Clov, his servant, who
cannot sit; and Nagg and Nell, his parents, who exist throughout in
ash cans. Everything is winding down to a finish, as in that
ultimate phase of a chess match which gives the play its title.
