Happy Days

In Happy Days, a woman is slowly buried in hot desert sand. At first the sand reaches only her upper abdomen; later it's her neck. As a result, Winnie can barely move her body. Her only company is a largely unresponsive husband named Willie, who sits out of sight somewhere behind his wife and her mound of sand. The Sun beats down unceasingly.

Winnie's response to this bleak situation is to entrench herself in cheerfulness. She does her makeup and chats cheerfully at her husband, giggling occasionally and repeatedly blessing the "happy" day.

Winnie seems utterly determined to deny reality, but betrays her false behavior with small, panicked outbursts. In one, she recounts a traumatic memory in which a mouse scares a girl, probably Winnie's sister. In telling this story, Winnie seems to lose her self-control, screaming and repeating the same words over again and over again (300). Something in the memory scares Winnie, and confronting that thing makes Winnie too unhappy for her to think about it long.

Life in Happy Days is an absurd struggle to deny the fear of death, to go through the motions of daily routine with a smile on one's face. Often in life, this absurdity is obscured by the comfort of routine and life's myriad distractions. Beckett strips all this familiarity away by situating his characters in an extreme environment, thus leaving the essence of life—existential struggle—completely exposed.