THE WORLD CORPSED IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME
THE WORLD CORPSED IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show that the key image in Beckett’s play Endgame may be considered to be a decay of the body and a parallel shrinking of the entire universe. There are no more bike wheels, pap, nature, sugar-plums, tides, navigators, rugs, pain killers or coffins. The absence of the last item points to an image of a landscape of unburied corpses, Hamm remembering Mother Pegg’s fear of not being buried. Characters are imprisoned in their bodies, houses and minds and there is a general state of paralysis of the body, leading to death or madness. Though the imagery in the play may be well related to the context in which it was written, i.e. the world in the aftermath of WWII, we would also like to draw attention to a more Irish background, i.e. the devastation of Ireland during the Great Famine in mid-19th century, the immediate physical consequences and the long-term trauma of the Irish psyche.

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