A Bare Interior

Much of Hamm's behavior in Endgame suggests indifference towards the world. Hamm berates and belittles his cohabitants with terse commands ("Silence!"), rude observations ("You pollute the air!"), and unabashed admissions ("There are no more sugar plums!") (124, 92, 130). His abuse is physical, too: Hamm keeps his parents, Nagg and Nell, "bottled" in human litter boxes and his companion Clov constantly occupied with meaningless tasks. Hamm demonstrates little concern for other people and summarizes his attitude in a response to Clov: "to hell with the universe" (122).

Yet other evidence suggests that this self-centered behavior is the bluff of a scared man that does indeed depend on his external environment. Hamm is incapacitated: he has no sight and cannot move from a chair in the center of a room's "bare interior" (89). The abilities to see and to explore can allow an individual to master an environment; deprived of those abilities, Hamm can only feel isolated and insignificant. Indeed, he likens himself to a "speck in the void, in the dark" (115). Nagg verifies his son's sense of isolation when he tells an anecdote about Hamm, as a "tiny boy," calling for his father because he was "frightened, in the dark" and Nagg was his "only hope" (130). Not only has Hamm always felt alone, he's also always depended on others for comfort. If, as a child in the night, comfort was Hamm's father, as a man in the bare interior, comfort is Clov and conversation.

Hamm and Clov depend on their interactions together to stave off silence, stillness, and isolation. When Clov wonders what keeps him in Hamm's company, Hamm replies, "the dialogue" (132). Hamm and Clov engage in a near-constant dialogue of words and actions. The two men may feign bitterness towards each other, but each seems to benefit from the engagement. This dependency is never clearer than when Hamm imagines Clov's departure:

   
     HAMM: If you leave me how shall I know?
     CLOV: [briskly] Well you simply whistle me and if I don't come running it means I've left you

     HAMM: You won't come and kiss me goodbye?

Hamm's last remark might be disingenuous, but from the length of the discussion (Hamm continues to ponder how he'd know if Clov had left him), it's clear that Hamm fears Clov's absence. Contrary to his indifferent attitude, Hamm depends on the people around him.

Waiting for Godot

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon reminisce, converse, and wonder, because these are the things people do when they wait, and waiting is what Vladimir and Estragon do. 

Like the bed-bound storytellers and devising devisors before them, Vladimir and Estragon must create in order for something to come. That something might not be Godot, but it can be memories, observations, and hopes–all things that don't come until created. 

A dead tree symbolizes the desolation in Godot. Fuel for creativity doesn't abound, so Vladimir and Estragon begin a metacommentary, in essence burning parts of their own ship to keep the dialogue going:

     VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.

     ESTRAGON: What for?

     VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.

     ESTRAGON: Ah! [Silence.] He didn't come?

     VLADIMIR: No.

     ESTRAGON: And now it's too late.

     VLADIMIR: Yes, now it's night.

     ESTRAGON: And if we dropped him? [Pause.] If we dropped him?

     VLADIMIR: He'd punish us. [Silence. He looks at the tree.] Everything's dead but the tree. 

     (Vol. III 83)

Death or waiting–these are Vladimir and Estragon's choices. The selection seems to be waiting, but only barely–a plan to hang themselves from the tree is tabled for a later date because of logistics. 

"Try again. Fail again. Fail Better": The (First) Trilogy

I think that Beckett's writing is a search for the irreducible—the stillness, the silence, the nothing left over when everything nonessential has been discarded.

This drive to discard appears in (and increases throughout) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. First, Beckett abandons narrative structure: plot, setting, and character identities blur or disappear altogether as the novels' perspectives move out of the familiar, external world and into the chaos of the interior mind. Beckett also abandons nonessential elements of language: line breaks, periods, and unnecessary words appear less and less, creating an amorphous stream of words that parallels the thinking mind. The resulting fiction is narrow in scope (limited to a bed, then to a head) and simple in construction (ultimately consisting of a 100+ page block of text).

But narrow in scope and simple in construction as it may be, the writing in Beckett's trilogy is not irreducible, but, rather, closer to the opposite of irreducible. Like the thoughts of a human mind, the writing is discursive, circling ideas, leaving gaps in its progression, forgetting earlier words, and filling volumes. The very act of writing the trilogy engenders the destruction of stillness, silence, and nothingness and the creation of movement, sound, and ever-reducible and critiquable somethingess.

In fact, the harder Beckett tries to boil away narrative order and grammatical conventions, the more spectacularly he fails to attain the irreducible. No longer bound by the limits of literary tradition or grammar, Beckett's writing is free to expand almost infinitely, and it does: by the final book of the trilogy, single paragraphs are ballooning to over 100 pages, and Beckett seems forced to cut the experiment off before he is consumed.

This is the paradox of Beckett's fiction: that capturing the essence of nothing requires something. The narrator of The Unnamable says it himself: "the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue" (293). Writers try to reach irreducible truths with language, but language becomes the obstacle to irreducible truths. Language is self-perpetuating; it becomes a response to itself, at once both "poison and antidote" (292).

Beckett and the irreducible