Nell’s Death in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

 

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Symbols have performed as tools for the writer and storyteller from the days of The Epic of Gilgamesh to the post-modern works of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. In Endgame, Samuel Beckett carried symbolism from its use as a literary device to employment as the driving force his story. How does one, after all, explore the hidden world of the mind- the world inside the head- without falling into trivial interior monologue? Beckett answered that question with his brilliant but disturbing one act play.

The four characters in the performance represent different aspects of the personality of the unseen character in whose mind they act out their play of existential angst. Hamm, the protagonist, plays the ego. Hamm is blind and confined to a wheelchair, and dependent upon his listless servant, Clov, the spirit of surrender in adversity. Nell and Nagg, Hamm’s parents who lost their legs in a bicycle accident, live in trash bins.. Nagg and Nell present themselves, not so much as Hamm’s parents and the dysfunctional family, but as symbols of old age and death. Hamm keeps his thoughts and fears of death in trash bins with the lids screwed down, even as he waits for his “finish”. Death “has no legs” for him. He suppresses thoughts of his end, but the two old people keep popping up out of their trashcans to remind him.

When Nell dies, her last word was, “Desert”. Life, as represented in the play, is a gray, sterile desert. Hamm instructed Clov to screw down the trash can lids, and then announces that he has to pee: If life is meaningless, then so is death. Nells’ death has little meaning to Hamm, but his attitude toward his own end has changed. He now welcomes the end of his pointless life. He encourages Clov to leave him, though he cannot survive without him.

Nell’s death had a greater impact on Hamm than he was willing to admit. It is the death of a parent, after all- especially the death of the mother- that brings to the son the awareness of his own mortality. Hamm’s resifnation to his end comes with Clov’s words on his departure: “Is this what we call making an exit?”

Nell’s death and Clov’s departure leaves us with questions without answers. Did Nell die? Or will she return the next day, in keeping with the play’s endless theme of endless cyclic time. Did Clov finally leave, as he had threatened so often? Or will he, too, return to live out the farce of life in the world of Beckett’s characters. In my interpretation, they will return. Nagg will ask for a kiss that Nell can’t deliver, and Clov will take Hamm on a tour of the world (around the walls of the room), just as he does every day, endlessly. The characters cannot die, for death gives us meaning to life. And in Hamm’s world, life has no meaning. It only fades to gray and begins again, where it left off. Endlessly.

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