Reading Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as a Tale of War
Reading Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as a Tale of War

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on the “tale of war” substratum of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play entitled Endgame. Containing hypothetical allusions to World War I or II, the drama requires a particularization of the critical perspective in the context of a Beckettian exegesis tempted to prevalently deal with generally human issues or theatre aesthetics. Our (subjective) close reading – doubled by a (more objective) stylistic awareness – reveals that the “war” discourse parallels (and sustains) the complementary discourse concerned with the failure of interpersonal skills, the collapse of “plot” and “character” or the limitations of the linguistic code.

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