Time, Progress, and Stasis Theme Analysis

In Beckett’s Endgame, time passes without a sense of progress or change, even though the entire play is predicated on the idea that Hamm and Clov are waiting for something to end. Of course, what they want to end never becomes entirely clear, but Hamm asserts early in the play that “it’s time it ended.” No matter how much Hamm insists throughout the piece that things are “nearly finished,” there is no true progress toward anything. In fact, the interactions he has with Clov, Nagg, and Nell are in and of themselves quite repetitive, as if these characters are doomed to perpetuate the same patterns over and over again. This sense of futile repetition is also evident in the way Clov serves Hamm, often carrying out the same rote tasks that ultimately do nothing for Hamm, who continues to shout orders without ever benefitting from Clov’s efforts. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Hamm views continuity and progression unfavorably—he curses “progenitors” (people who reproduce) and constantly yearns for an ending. And yet, Hamm also can’t bring himself to embrace finality, admitting that he finds himself “hesitating” to “end.” It is this tension between progression and stasis that defines Endgame: whatever happens, it seems, won’t matter, since the only thing that will actually end is the play itself, and even this ending lacks any sense of conclusion. And though this dim view of progression could possibly reflect the belief that humanity (or perhaps society) is incapable of genuine advancement, the play’s overarching theory remains vague, turning the entire piece into little more than a meditation on the way humans experience the passage of time.

One of the reasons that the literal ending of Endgame doesn’t feel like a conclusion is that there has been absolutely no progress throughout the play. This is somewhat unsurprising, considering that the first line of the entire piece comes when Clov says, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” If whatever the play is about has already finished at the very outset, then there’s nowhere for it to go, no chance that it will progress in any meaningful way. This accords with Hamm’s later assertion that “the end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” In this moment, Beckett basically tells the audience that they have already seen everything that will take place in this play, even though the play itself hasn’t yet ended. Indeed, what Hamm says about the end being in the beginning is perhaps the best possible way to describe Endgame, since Hamm and Clov undergo almost no change whatsoever despite the fact that they apparently try to “go on” in various ways. For example, Clov finally decides that he’s going to leave Hamm once and for all, even dressing for the journey and preparing to set out. However, he never departs, instead watching in silence as Hamm babbles on and on about waiting for an end. Together, it seems, these two men are going to wait for eternity, longing for a conclusion without doing anything to embrace finality.

Perhaps the one character who actually breaks out of the cyclical stasis of Hamm and Clov’s world is Hamm’s mother, Nell, who dies in her trash bin near the end of the play. This event is the only thing that takes place in Endgame that changes the circumstances from the beginning of the play to the end. However, Nell plays a very minor roll, so the effect of her death on the overall narrative is still quite minute. In keeping with this, Hamm isn’t even remotely impacted by his mother’s death, immediately moving on to talk to Clov about the nature of happiness and, when that conversation fizzles, asking him to push his chair beneath the window—something he has already requested several times. That Hamm so quickly reverts to his normal patterns in the aftermath of his mother’s death is significant, since it suggests that even if some kind of change were to take place in his immediate environment, it would hardly influence or change the general circumstances of his life or, for that matter, the play.

Extrapolating the way that time works in Endgame into a larger idea or theory is quite difficult, because the context in which the characters exist is so abstract and unlike real life. All the same, there are several possible interpretations that can be drawn from Beckett’s examination of pointless repetition and endless waiting. First, the comments that Hamm and Clov make about working their way toward some sort of ending could potentially be understood as metanarrative comments about the actual play. After all, the play is the only tangible thing that ends, and Hamm even says things like, “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy”—assertions that suggest Hamm is aware of his status as character and call attention to the way the play is unfolding, informing viewers that it will soon be over. Furthermore, it’s worth considering that Beckett wrote Endgame in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, two of the greatest travesties of the 20th century. Bearing this in mind, the fact that the play contains no sense of progression intimates that Beckett views society at large as incapable of moving beyond its vast failures. This, however, is a historical superimposition that—while valid in its attempt to connect the play to real-world events—only appears as a vague metaphor, since Endgame is altogether too abstract and vague to address such concerns with specificity. In turn, readers are simply invited to consider the fact that the passage of time doesn’t always lead to meaningful change.