Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The Works in question

            Beyond Samuel Beckett’s insistence that “Endgame” is not a portrayal of life after an apocalypse, one would often find themselves fighting the urge to create a setting in which all the characters are hopelessly at the mercy of some horrible cataclysmic event.  If that is the case, than it is rather easy to find some sort of comparison with that play and the short novel “The Road”, written by Cormac McCarthy.  For such a reason this paper will be used to create some meaningful connections and contrasts between the two pieces of work in the hopes that will help Identify “Endgame” with its British origins and further define some symbolism common to this unorthodox genre of literature.

The Two Minds at Work

            To begin, we need to establish a brief synopsis of both stories starting with “Endgame”. Beckett creates a play revolving around four central characters.  Hamm, a blind invalid who is still recognized as the head of the household, a servant named Clov who suffers at the hands of Hamm but feels compelled to remain and care for him, and Hamm’s parents named Nagg and Nell, who live in separate trash bins placed within the home.  The play itself never directly indicates that they are living in a time after some global disaster, but it is greatly insinuated that there is nothing (zero) outside, the world and everything in it is either dead or dying, and that their existence is rather meaningless.

            McCarthy’s “The Road”, is similarly set in a time where everything is either dead or dying, in a drab grey sterile existence in which a man and his son struggle to survive in the wasteland that consists of a post-apocalyptic America.

The Difference in Culture

            A point of notable interest between the two stories, lies within the culture in which either one were written.  Beckett’s “Endgame” gives a distinct British flavor to its plotline, while McCarthy’s “The Road” truly gives an American twist to a fatalistic story.  “Endgame” premiered in 1957, when Britain was still living in the wake of Post World War II.  The immense cost of the war in money, destruction, and lives created a pocket of isolation from the remainder of Europe as Britain desperately tried to find its feet again.  That feeling of futility and isolation was certainly reverberated throughout the play as all four characters felt trapped in their own anonymity and lack of purpose.  It was that lack that perpetrated the need for repetition, useless rhetoric, and farcical rituals in the vain hopes to regain some reason for continue surviving.