Hamm's creation here seems to be an internal one, that inner world peopled by the imagination of a blind man. Whereas Clov is concerned with the external, with the one physical setting itself—he speculates that "There's nowhere else"—Hamm's concern is that of "Text 2": "Perhaps we're in a head." Deprived of a sense of perspective by his blindness, he can only think of man and, more specifically, of himself as the macrocosm. Appropriately, his speculation is that there is "no one else." For Hamm the external world is the illusion, in the most negative sense of that word: "Outside of here it's death."

At the start Hamm is asleep, his power of creation dormant. He may well be dreaming, for several times during the play he makes reference to the pleasures of this state. As in the medieval dream vision, he moves, after Clov's...