It is useless to attempt a traditional synopsis of Fin de Partie (Endgame, 1957) by Samuel Beckett: the plot is minimal, and the characters’ dialogues offer little guidance. Already in Waiting for Godot, written in the late 1940s, Beckett had undertaken a radical dismantling of drama based on nineteenth-century conversation. In Endgame, dialogues are reduced to an exchange “that exists for itself and is deprived of its meaningful function.”
In a partially subterranean bunker – perhaps evoking the atomic war and the devastation of the last world war – Hamm, blind and in a wheelchair, faces Clov, his son, who can never sit still, and, confined in two trash bins, Hamm’s parents: Nell and Nagg. From the windows that can only be reached with effort and from a few fragmentary lines of dialogue, it becomes clear that the world outside is dissolving: there is no nature, no sea, no land, and all other beings have vanished, except for a mouse that emerges from a corner in the kitchen and must immediately be killed «because from there humanity could reconstitute itself». As in his previous works, the narrative proceeds without the pretense of reaching an ending – which indeed never arrives.
Starting from Fin de Partie, whose initials he reverses, Moguillansky sets in motion a play of mirrors and echoes, creating a kaleidoscopic variation on Beckett’s famous play. A child and a blind man gaze at a boundless lake. Two actors meet as lovers to rehearse an...
Adorno interprets the play as reflecting the loss of meaning in language after a war that destroyed everything: «after events have occurred to which even the survivors cannot truly survive». Yet, on a close reading, delicate literary and philosophical references emerge: biblical quotations from the Book of Daniel with the Aramaic mane, tekel, fares, Plato and the Allegory of the Cave, Zeno’s paradox on the impossibility of motion, and perhaps even Deuteronomy on the death of Moses. The play is also full of metatheatrical references, such as Clov’s final exclamation, commenting on his apparent departure: «That is what they call exiting the stage». Perhaps slightly irreverent, but telling, is the interpretation that sees the ultimate meaning of the play in Nagg’s story of the English traveler who asks a tailor to make a pair of trousers. They are never perfect except after six months.
The English gentleman complains: «But God made the world in six days, and you take six months for a pair of trousers». The tailor’s reply: «But Milord! Look at the world (gesture of disdain and disgust)… and look (gesture of affection) at my trousers!».
