Various keys to Endgame's interpretation are in place: "Endgame" is a term of chess; the name Hamm is shared by Noah's cursed son, it titles a kind of actor, it starts recalling Hamlet. But no interpretation I have seen details the textual evidence for these relations nor shows how the play's meaning opens with them. Without this, we will have a general impression of the play, one something like this: Beckett's perception is of a "meaningless universe"...

In the following essay, Kumar notes that chess is the underlying metaphor in Beckett's Endgame and explains the characters' inability to move, need for protection, and use of pawns as metaphors for human existence.

After the little canters of Waiting for Godot, Beckett composed a substantial "chronicle" for Endgame, providing one of the best examples of extended narrative as an essential part of drama: the presence of story is unmistakable here, both to the audience and to characters within the play. Hamm refers by name to his "chronicle" and is self-conscious in his narration of it, aware of himself assuming the role of historian, aware of himself adopting a special voice and manner settin...

If Waiting for Godot shows its two heroes whiling away the time in a succession of desultory, and never-ending, games, Beckett's second play deals with an "endgame," the final game in the hour of death. Waiting for Godot takes place on a terrifyingly empty open road, Endgame in a claustrophobic interior. Waiting for Godot consists of two symmetrical movements that balance each other; Endgame has only one act that shows the running down of a mechanism until it comes to a stop. Yet Endgam...

A play aborted and a play jettisoned contrast with Beckett's favorite play, Endgame, which was worked, reworked, and translated from the French. As an approximation, Deirdre Bair is probably right in her Samuel Beckett, 1978 to surmise that Beckett turned to drama when he reached a creative impasse, but drama too can be an impasse, and Beckett labored two years over Fin de partie. Of all his plays, it underwent most extensive revision. Beckett wrote his friend, anglicist Jean-Jacques Mayoux:

One way in which a play holds the attention of an audience for the duration of its performance is by presenting an action which may be formulated as a question: Who killed Laius? How will Hamlet revenge his father? Endgame has a plot at least to the extent that it holds its audience with an uncertainty, one which is continuously reiterated from the stage: Will Clov leave Hamm? At the end, when the final tableau shows Clov standing there, with umbrella, raincoat, and bag, unable to stay and unable to go, the...

Endgame, like Waiting for Godot has its echo of The Tempest. But where Lucky remembered divine Miranda, Hamm derisively recalls the world-weary Prospero: 'Our revels now are ended. (He gropes for the dog.)' The difference is of a piece with the difference between Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The latter is at once a bleaker and a more perplexing play. Vladimir and Estragon have their basic health, for all their disappointments and discomforts, whereas Hamm is confined to a wheelchair, blood i...

The stage is a place to wait. The place itself waits, when no one is in it. When the curtain rises on Endgame, sheets drape all visible objects as in a furniture warehouse. Clov's first act is to uncurtain the two high windows and inspect the universe; his second is to remove the sheets and fold them carefully over his arm, disclosing two ash cans and a figure in an armchair. This is so plainly a metaphor for waking up that we fancy the stage, with its high peepholes, to be the inside of an immense s...

The terminal world of Beckett's Endgame, with its "corpsed" aspect outside the stage-refuge and its barbed play inside, sustains life solely, it seems, by reason of its ruler's procrastination. "Enough, it's time it ended, in the refuge too," proclaims Hamm at the outset. "And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to … to end." His hesitation is a problem not least because of "that hatred of nature as process (birth and copulation and death) ...

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. Human...

In the following essay, Williams explores the rejection of God and God's works in Endgame, and underscores humankind's ability and almost eagerness to self-destruct in a nuclear era.

Toscan: What about Endgame, in which you played Clov? [MacGowran]: Endgame presented different problems [from Waiting for Godot]. The world upon which Clov looked, through the window, was a world devoid of anything, any human living being. So perhaps this could be taken as a futuristic play, an example of genocidal factors, of races that have been killed off. The world upon which Clov looks is more a moon-scape than an earthly vision. That's why Endgame is the harshest of the plays and the most tragi...

In a play "you have definite space and people in this space. That's relaxing" Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett, 1973. But the actual locations Beckett chooses for his characters and for the actors who play them, is anything but relaxing. In the first plays there is at least something an actor can relate to spatially—a country road and a tree; an empty room with two windows, two ashbins and a wheelchair; a mound in the middle of a "trompe l'oeil" desert. In later pl...

Samuel Beckett's Endgame is a Mystery of final things: as death, the end of an age. Being altogether modern, it is also a comedy. We do not weep in the theater nowadays over futility, protracted dreariness or doom: we laugh. "Endgame" is a technical term signifying the last stage in playing a hand, the position of the important card having been generally known, and the play being determined accordingly; or the point in the game when the forces (in chess or checkers) have been greatly re...

Jean-jacques Mayoux on "reality" in Endgame: Endgame (1957), more definitely even than Godot, is 'in a head', and the brain-grey bare room with its two high windows is evidently a gloomy inner aspect of the microcosm. 'Reality' is here twice removed: it is not Beckett's but Hamm's vision, sick, subjective, severely coherent as such, yet again slyly bursting those bounds; and doublelevelled since Hamm pointedly i...

Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! There is no bottom to the nihilism of Samuel Beckett, but each time, as he is going down forever, he finds a flicker of wit and kicks on for another few strokes. For a poet, total renunciation is probably impossible—he is forced to believe in his own poetry and from that he can rebuild a universe.

Two years ago, Samuel Beckett's theatrical parable Waiting for Godot came to the attention of American audiences and moved many of us to wild enthusiasm. (The fact that many others were put off entirely by it only added to the fun.) Whatever Mr. Beckett may have intended in that play, actually he had written an enigma which teased one with the question whether it was worth it to wait for the appearance of an absolute that seemed perpetually slow in coming. The play was open-ended, somewhat like Frank...