End Game is my favorite of his -- really haunting, it stuck with me for months after reading it. Not crap at all.

From what I've read of it, the biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, is excellent. Reading some of the description on that link, I wish that I had done more than just browse through it whilst staying at a friend's flat:-

The biography, though sadly shortened from the manuscript, is enlivened by suggestive details. Examples: Beckett's maternal grandmother rebuked a granddaughter who loved chocolates. ''You shouldn't love something to eat, my dear. You should only love God.'' His uncle Gerald Beckett, rather different, called life ''a disease of matter.'' When Beckett's father died, Gerald comforted the widow: ''Well, May, he's got it over. What is it all about, in the end, for us all, from the cry go, but get it over?''

Apparently, he truly was a mother's boy:-

With bitterness and detachment he summarized what he now knew about his illness. Mr. Knowlson specifies its causes: ''the intensity of his mother's attachment to him and his powerful love-hate bond with her.'' Later, fleeing his mother and Ireland after a dreadful quarrel, Beckett offered MacGreevy a memorable phrase: ''I am what her savage loving has made me.''

And he was a badass, in his own style:-

That topic prepares us for Beckett's activities with a French Resistance group and with the Irish Red Cross in France after World War II. In this grim work he displayed ''astonishing powers of concentration, a meticulous attention to detail,'' Mr. Knowlson says; he could ''organize, reduce and sift very diffuse material so as to make it succinct and intelligible.'' Those qualities recur in his writings. Additionally, ''sheer obstinacy . . . was, he commented himself, a constant trait in his character.''

Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

The Collected Shorter Plays is one of the most rewarding books I own. A Piece of Monologue is one of the greatest pieces of writing in any genre. No-one else except maybe Paul Celan comes close to the way Beckett can articulate pain, and all the problems with that act.

The novels and the Collected Prose are extraordinary, and the poetry is pretty fine.

Film is a great and weird document. Buster Keaton, man. What a great combination.

Samuel Beckett, you are not crap. I don't think he ever wrote anything truly crap. The early poetry is a bit hit and miss, but any waffle factor is crushed by one of the most singular bodies of work any writer has ever produced.

And he looked fucking cool, too.

That book is excellent, but Knowlson is a little less objective than Bair was. Then again, Knowlson was the better biographer overall due to his friendship with Beckett and nearly endless resources.

Get it. Highly recommended.

Houseboat, you too. When you see just how heavily autobiographical Beckett's poetry was for him, you get a whole new appreciation of it.

houseboat wrote:Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

Can someone explain what Endgame is about? I mean, I know the basics of the characters' situation. But what is it *about*? Like, what was I supposed to come away from it with? I've read it three times over the course of my life and every time I've put it down and said, "I have no idea what the fuck that was. What was that?"

Please?

NerblyBear wrote:

houseboat wrote:Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

Can someone explain what Endgame is about? I mean, I know the basics of the characters' situation. But what is it *about*? Like, what was I supposed to come away from it with? I've read it three times over the course of my life and every time I've put it down and said, "I have no idea what the fuck that was. What was that?"

Please?

If it feels like Endgame is going nowhere, that's because it's *supposed* to go nowhere. Hamm and Clov allude to having some kind of history together, but through the Groundhog Day-ish dayto-day goings on in their lives, and the fact that no real outside world is described, it slowly becomes apparent that this is their future. Existential death. Sit around at home, stare at the walls, look at each other and wait 'till we die.

NerblyBear wrote:

houseboat wrote:Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

Can someone explain what Endgame is about? I mean, I know the basics of the characters' situation. But what is it *about*? Like, what was I supposed to come away from it with? I've read it three times over the course of my life and every time I've put it down and said, "I have no idea what the fuck that was. What was that?"

Please?

Endgame refers to the last part of a chess game, where there are very few pieces left, usually four or less.

In the play, there are four characters, two relegated to bins, and the other two, one who can't stand and one who can't sit. This suggests a sort of stalemate. The dialogue implies that there is nothing left outside, and their simply being in this tiny house suggests there's nothing left to do.

Remember the first bit in Molloy, where he states he is in the room to "finish dying"? Given that the first bit of Fin de partie was written around the same time as Molloy, at least found in notebooks where lines were stricken from Endgame and put into Molloy and vice versa, it is perhaps arguable that it deals with Beckett's fixation of an Endgame...where there is nothing left to do except for take the queen, and if that cannot be done, then there is no movement left except to end (die).

I have read that many people think they are the survivors of a post-apocalyptic occurrence, but even Beckett broke his silence on the meaning of the play to deny this claim. Basically, the play is most often thought to represent the stagnation of people who cannot shed what it is for them to be human (and in Beckett's world, humans are little more than barely thinking, arguing, shitting, pissing creatures for the most part) which is further proven by the presence of Nagg and Nell, who exist in a subworld of senility, only popping out to argue and ask for food. Nell even DIES and it is not a CLIMAX. The tone remains the same; never spiked, never faltered.

Supposedly, there is an undertone of Hamlet, as if Endgame is meant to propose a question similar to "To be or not to be?" Hamm even could represent a lesser Hamlet who has chosen NOT TO BE, but although this theory is also shared by a multitude of Beckett scholars (the most prominent being Harold Bloom who has collected some essays on this very idea), it is another very un-Beckett thing for Beckett to have done. That is, reference a work that people have read.



The dialogue mentions "finishing" and "beginning" almost within the same breath, in so many words, sometimes spoken by just one character within just one bit of speech. Shows the unmoving void within which they operate. There is no end or no beginning, despite the title. Just like in Godot: Vladimir and Estragon would be waiting before and after the audience was there, and somewhere, along some strand of time that also blends fiction/reality, they are still waiting and will forever be, despite forever being a measurement of time that suggests progression, there is no progression, there is only what is and what is not and what is not is often what is. Whew!

Anyways, it is another one of those brilliant Beckett plays, just like Godot, where nothing happens. NOTHING. And it is how the audience views that nothing, perhaps even applies it to their own personal nothing, which forms a greater nothing, which is always nothing, and never will be more than nothing. So what is the point? Indeed, what is the point in nothing? Is Endgame to reflect the disappearance of all worth within two men who simply must wait for the end, or at least the next move? No. Perhaps they have always been nothing, never to be more, never to stand/sit, but just to be, painfully, to be not being.

That is, in a way, I believe, Beckett's own soliloquy: To be not being.

FuzzBob wrote:

NerblyBear wrote:

houseboat wrote:Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

Can someone explain what Endgame is about? I mean, I know the basics of the characters' situation. But what is it *about*? Like, what was I supposed to come away from it with? I've read it three times over the course of my life and every time I've put it down and said, "I have no idea what the fuck that was. What was that?"

Please?

If it feels like Endgame is going nowhere, that's because it's *supposed* to go nowhere. Hamm and Clov allude to having some kind of history together, but through the Groundhog Day-ish dayto-day goings on in their lives, and the fact that no real outside world is described, it slowly becomes apparent that this is their future. Existential death. Sit around at home, stare at the walls, look at each other and wait 'till we die.

You wrote this while I wrote my response...swear to god, almost used the same last line.

Steve V. wrote:

FuzzBob wrote:

NerblyBear wrote:

houseboat wrote:Not Crap at all.

Endgame, Godot, Happy Days are masterpieces, no arguments.

Can someone explain what Endgame is about? I mean, I know the basics of the characters' situation. But what is it *about*? Like, what was I supposed to come away from it with? I've read it three times over the course of my life and every time I've put it down and said, "I have no idea what the fuck that was. What was that?"

Please?

If it feels like Endgame is going nowhere, that's because it's *supposed* to go nowhere. Hamm and Clov allude to having some kind of history together, but through the Groundhog Day-ish dayto-day goings on in their lives, and the fact that no real outside world is described, it slowly becomes apparent that this is their future. Existential death. Sit around at home, stare at the walls, look at each other and wait 'till we die.

You wrote this while I wrote my response...swear to god, almost used the same last line.

How odd-- I was this close to mentioning "shuffling off this mortal coil."