Alienation, Nothingness, and Death in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Abstract

Abstract Some dramatists of the modern age portray the world as a trivial, meaningless and that there is nothing left for the human being but death. Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright whose works have been translated into over twenty languages and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, shows how the human being is isolated from the world and obliged to live a life not of his choice. According to Beckett, Man has lost the meaning of living and everyday repeats itself. He believes that the modern man is spiritually disinterested. This is so clear in his play Endgame where he employed some concepts of existentialism such as death and loneliness. This paper is divided into two sections and a conclusion. Section one deals with an introduction on the absurd theatre and Existentialism and how they are reflected in Endgame. Moreover, this section shows Beckett’s language and how he used the memory of his characters to serve his purpose in depicting the modern world. Section two sheds light on the main themes in Endgame such as nothingness, alienation, and death.