#Sentence fragment game windows

After Hamm removes a bloodstained handkerchief from over his head and face, he says 'It's time it ended.' He summons Clov by means of a whistle, and they banter briefly.Įventually, Hamm's parents, Nell and Nagg, appear from inside two trash cans at the back of the stage. He awakes Hamm by pulling a sheet from over him. He says, 'It's nearly finished,' though it is not clear what he is referring to.

#Sentence fragment game windows

In a dreary, dim and nondescript room, Clov draws the curtains from the windows and prepares his master Hamm for his day.

Hamm, limited in his movement, resembles the king piece on a chess board, and Clov, who moves for him, a knight. Hamm at one point says 'My kingdom for a knight-man!'. The play is dimly visible as a kind of metaphorical chess, albeit with limited symbolic meaning. Samuel Beckett said that in his choice of character's names, he had in mind the word 'hammer' and the word 'nail' in English, French and German respectively, 'clou' and 'nagel'.īeckett was an avid chess player, and the term endgame refers to the ending phase of a chess game. Reflective, she delivers a monologue about a beautiful day on Lake Como, and apparently dies during the course of the play.

Nell: Hamm's mother who has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg.

Nagg is gentle and fatherly, yet sorrowful and aggrieved in the face of his son's ingratitude.

Nagg: Hamm's father who has no legs and lives in a dustbin.

More mundane than Hamm, he reflects on his opportunities but takes little charge. He longs for something else, but has nothing to pursue.

Clov: Hamm's servant who is unable to sit.

His relationships come off as parched of human empathy he refers to his father as a 'fornicator', refused to help his neighbor with oil for her lamp when she badly needed it, and has a fake pet dog which is a stuffed animal. He chooses to be isolated and self-absorbed. He claims to suffer, but his pessimism seems self-elected. Hamm is dominating, acrimonious, banterous and comfortable in his misery. Hamm: Throughout the play remaining seated in an armchair fitted with castors, unable to stand and blind.Samuel Beckett considered it his masterpiece as the most aesthetically perfect, compact representation of his artistic views on human existence, and refers to it when speaking autobiographically through Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape when he mentions he had 'already written the masterpiece'. The literary critic Harold Bloom called it the greatest prose drama of the 20th century, saying 'I know of no other work of its reverberatory power,' but stated that he could not handle reading it in old age for its harrowing, bare bone existentialism. Written before but premiering after Waiting for Godot, it is arguably among Beckett's best works. Originally written in French (entitled Fin de partie), the play was translated into English by Beckett himself and was first performed on Apat the Royal Court Theatre in London in a French-language production. The play's title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate. An aesthetically profound part of the play is the way the story-within-story and the actual play come to an end at roughly the same time. Much of the play's content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions the plot is held together by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story that the character Hamm is relating. EndgameĮndgame, by Samuel Beckett, is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned house in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, who mention they are awaiting some unspecified 'end' which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself.

For other uses, see Endgame (disambiguation).