Dead Endgame
... Stef Craps Karel Dierickx, Group G / take-home essay A common theme in The Dead (James Joyce) and Endgame (Samuel Beckett) is disenchantment or disillusionment – religious, psychological and/or, ideological. ... I however shall confine myself to The Dead and Endgame, respectively a short story of Dubliners, and a play that has been depicted ‘a tragicomedy bathing in Absurdist drama [. ... I will discuss this theme by comparing the two main charachters in The Dead and Endgame, being respectively Gabriel Conroy and Hamm. ... In Endgame these paralyzing circumstances are to be read literally, namely the weelchair and bliindness of Hamm. ... This brings us to the existential aspect of the part: following Hamm, ‘being alive’ simply signifies not being dead. ... HAMM: Gone from me you’d be dead. ... I think this piece of dialogue represents exactly the superior feeling of Hamm (‘gone from me, you’d be dead’), and the prisonlike image of his situation (‘outside of here’). The Dead as a title, might refer also to the people present at the party. As dead, in life, they are paralyzed. ... The many biblical references in Endgame, and the way they are mocked by Hamm, point out the head charachter’s religious disappointment, which led him to even think in nihilist terms about life as such: being alive means nothing, being dead means even less. ... Surprisingly, it seems as if Hamm anticipated the theme of The Dead in the last sentence of this piece of dialogue. The paralysis in The Dead is somehow more sophisticated, more between the lines in a way. ... 2524] His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ... All the rest is blurred (image of snow in The Dead, Hamm’s blindness in Endgame), and not real.