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 is an actor playing Hamm:

CLOV: What is there to keep me here?

HAMM: The dialogue.

And again:

HAMM: I'm warming up for my last soliloquy …

Jean-Jacques Mayoux, in his Samuel Beckett, Longman Group, 1974.

Beckett locates his comedy precisely in the no-man's-land between the play and the world. His characters and his audience face the same dilemma: they must get through their lives and we must get through the play. "What's happening, what's happening?" asks the main character of Beckett's masterpiece...