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  • Essay / Almost nothing: the setting of Endgame

    The setting of Endgame is characteristic of a Beckett play; decor reduced to the strict minimum. A bare stage, both poetic symbol and parody of traditional theater, with only two trash cans, a chair and an upside-down painting to look at. At the top of the walls, we get a sense of the rest of Beckett's empty world through the small windows looking outside. “On these scenes of disaster the characters play their ridiculous role.” (Fletcher, 48 years old)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Traditional theater attempts to stage a slice of life for the audience's enjoyment. The general idea is to make the audience believe they are watching something they have seen before. For example, a cockroach-infested apartment or even a relatively simple office scene helps interact with the characters before they speak. We know what to expect because we know the plight of the starving artist with his shabby little apartment and we already expect the businessman to be under considerable stress. Beckett places his text in a place where we have never been, and God willing, a place that will never exist: a kind of bunker, which resembles the inside of a skull with its neuroses squabbling inside. the interior. When the curtain opens on a place like the only thing you can do is start preparing yourself for what could possibly live in such an environment. The divide between the world we live in and the one in front of us has been established before any of the characters open their mouths and it's up to us, as the audience, to figure out where we stand. As we discover, slowly but surely, we are at the end of the world. Comedian Lewis Black claims to have seen the end of the world in Texas when he discovered a street with a Starbucks right across the street from another Starbucks, but Beckett made the end of the world the kind of place where the question " what time is it?” » evokes the answer: “As usual. » The action in this play, if you can call it that, is a Beckettian norm of people moving around the stage and talking for the sole purpose of relieving boredom. They talk and talk in anticipation of death's arrival, and like Godot, the sweet release of death never comes (except for Nell who is the only one to ask the direct question: "Why this farce every day?") . The only thing that separates these miserable characters from death is the senseless boredom of their lives. Clov knows like everyone else that there is nothing to see on the horizon, but reaching for the ladder, going up and down, and even voluntarily letting go of his telescope, helps pass the hours of the day. What other possible reason, other than avoiding madness, would there be for repeating the same joke over and over again. Not to mention fondly remembering the first time the joke was told before telling it. "The Beckettian hero is a kind of clown who uses words and performs gestures intended to amuse, to pass the time. But unlike a real clown, he does not seek to amuse others, but to alleviate his own boredom; he acts, but for himself” (Fletcher, 58) This is the type of world in which a slow, half-starved man pushing a crippled old man's chair in a circle is considered the sequence of. action. They have the same conversations over and over again, they reflect on being forgotten by nature It would seem that nature has no part in the absurdity on stage, but they are confronted with the reality of one. nature which continues to age their bodies Despite the absence of meaning, they continue their monotonous life. To explain this behavior, Hamm says: "We do what we can",, 1999. 93-137.