Endgame

“It seems they’ve gone all white.”

Hamm suspects that Clov has been secretly looking at his eyes. In recent times, Hamm has lost his sight. He tells Clov that his eyes have gone “all white” (7), yet he has no way of knowing this. Hamm is trapped in a dark world, but he continues to instruct Clov on how everything around him looks. The blind Hamm describes the color of his eyes—eyes which no longer see—to the fully sighted Clov.

“When there were still bicycles I wept to have one.”

When he was young, Clov wanted a bicycle. Now, there are no more bicycles. In this post-apocalyptic hellscape, there are no more bicycles and no more desires. Whereas Clov would once have wept at the possibility of owning a bicycle, he is now depressed and indifferent to the idea of desire itself. Not only possessions have been left behind in the past, but also the concept of desire.

“Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted?”

Clov’s seeds will never sprout, but Hamm insists on giving him gardening advice. Hamm helped to raise Clov, even though he spends most of his days criticizing Clov’s habits. He is a terrible role model, as Clov knows all too well. As such, his advice on how to grow anything serves as a bitter reminder to Clov, forcing him to confront his resentment toward the man who taught him everything.

“Our hearing.”

Nell and Nagg are both stuck in their garbage cans. As they discuss the loss of their senses, their individual senses become shared senses. They begin using the pronoun “our” (13) for something as subjective and individual as sight or hearing. The longer they are trapped, the more their gradual loss of everything becomes a burden that they share together. When Nagg loses Nell, this burden will be even heavier.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.”

Nell admits that unhappiness is the funniest thing she can imagine. In the absurd nature of this particular post-apocalyptic setting, the bleakness of the situation produces humor. Nell cannot imagine happiness, so cynicism and pessimism become humorous in the humorless world.

“Will this never finish?”

Hamm’s occasional remarks reflect his deep yearning for death. Whether he is complaining about his routine, his annoyance with his parents, or the nature of existence itself, he demonstrates a consistent desire that everything should simply finish. In the post-apocalyptic world, with his physical form and his mind decaying, he can see little point in continuing for much longer.

“If I could kill him I’d die happy.”

Clov imagines how happy he might be if he could kill Hamm. This desire is an ironic inversion of the military policy of mutually assured destruction, in which countries avoided nuclear war because they would eradicate one another if such a war ever began. After the end of the world, this smaller scale inversion of mutually assured destruction is now appealing to Clov.

“What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?”

When the characters look toward the horizon, they see nothing. Since everything has been destroyed, there is no longer anything to strive toward. Instead, they remain trapped in their house with nowhere to go. Their lives have become directionless, devoid of ambition, and defined by an inability to imagine a better world beyond the immediately visible.

“But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God.”

Hamm hears about the flea and imagines, to his horror, that millions of years down the line the flea might bring some form of civilization back to earth. He can imagine nothing worse. The earth has enjoyed civilization for some time but it has proved a disaster. To try again would be a tragedy, so all potential must be destroyed.

“Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.”

Hamm chastises and threatens Clov. In doing so, however, he reveals his feelings about his own life. The greatest threat which Hamm can hurl at Clov is to live a life of “infinite emptiness” (24), the kind of existence Hamm himself endures. Hamm’s threat to Clov is that in the future Clov will become just like Hamm. Rather than compelling Clov to stay, such insults only remind Clov why he needs to leave.

“We’re getting on.”

Hamm repeats the phrase “we’re getting on” (25) throughout the play. The phrase has two meanings. The first is a statement declaring that he and Clov are getting along as friends. The second is temporal, suggesting that their time is running out. The first meaning is repeated as a desperate mantra by a man who wants to assure himself that he has something resembling a friendship. The second meaning shows that Hamm is deeply fearful of impending doom but relieved, at least, to face it with someone else. The plural pronoun is important, signaling that Hamm subconsciously wants to face the unknown future with someone at his side.

“We too were bonny—once. It’s a rare thing not to have been bonny—once.”

Even Clov’s most wistful and nostalgic comments are inherently limited. The idea that everyone was bonny at some time in the past is hopeful, but he confesses that such a time was rare. No one is bonny anymore and most only got to experience the feeling of happiness “once” (27). Bonny describes something happy, beautiful, or attractive. There is nothing bonny left in Clov’s miserable world.

“That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”

Hamm took Clov into his home and raised him. As such, Clov is largely responsible for whatever flaws in Clov’s personality annoy him so much. Clov confronts Hamm with this reality, telling him that if Hamm wants him to behave in a different way, then he must teach him something new, as there is no one left to teach him. The empty, faded world is all Clov has ever known.

“There’ll be no more speech.”

For the characters in the play, meaning derives from speech. There are few people left on earth, and those that are left seem to come alive only through speech. Hamm feels this, frequently speaking at length in an attempt to assert his own vitality. When he imagines the future, however, his death resembles a world without speech. When there is no more speech, Hamm suggests, there is no more world.

“Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.”

At several points, Hamm illustrates the existentialist themes of the play by framing existence on earth as some kind of incurable disease. He no longer has his painkillers, a medicine which might make life tolerable, meaning that the rest of existence is a process of navigating this pain. The pain is physical, emotional, and psychological. His body aches, his past haunts him, and he cannot make emotive connections with others. When he tells Clov to use his head, he is calling on Clov to recognize the impossibility of their situation and the futility of existence itself.

“He’s not a real dog, he can’t go.”

Clov is forced to remind Hamm that his toy dog cannot “go” (35) because he is not a real dog. When Clov says this, however, he prompts a moment of introspection. He has threatened to go but he knows that this is an empty threat. Since he cannot go, he wonders whether this means that he is not a real person. Clov begins to define his own realness by his ability to leave, an ability which he is increasingly disposed to exercise.

“If I could drag myself down to the sea! I’d make a pillow of sand for my head and the tide would come.”

Hamm wishes that he could lie down on the beach and allow the rising tide to drown him. Since he lacks the physical capability to move himself, however, he is trapped in his house. Hamm dedicates his imagination to conjuring up outlandish ways in which to kill himself, but these methods always reunite him with the natural world. He is buried under dirt or swallowed by the sea, rather than left to rot in the detritus of the world that the humans have destroyed.

“It’s because there are no more navigators.”

There are so few people left in the world that traditional professions or job roles have ceased to exist. There are no more navigators because there is nothing left to navigate. The world outside is a lifeless abyss and the few people who remain cannot envision the world beyond the building’s walls, let alone a way forward or any form of directional travel. The loss of the navigators is not simply a loss of professional knowledge and institutions, but a demonstration that humanity itself has become a listless, directionless, and doomed entity.

“If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die.”

Clov announces that he must kill the rat, otherwise it will die. The material outcome is the same, as the rat is dead in either circumstance, but the rat dying on its own does nothing to help Clov. He needs to kill the rat for his sake, rather than the rat’s sake, as killing the rat will give him a fleeting moment of purpose in his meaningless existence. He is desperate to believe that he has accomplished something, even if the outcome is inevitable.

“There’s no more pain-killer.”

Hamm runs out of painkillers just before Clov decides to leave. Without his actual painkillers and without Clov, Hamm will no longer be able to numb himself to the pain of existence. There will be no Clov to distract him or move him and no medicine to dull the physical pain. Hamm’s worst possible world is one in which he is forced to confront the pain of existence with nothing to mitigate his suffering.

“A kind of great compassion.”

In the desolate world of the characters, the only thing resembling actual passion is mere presence. When speculating over why Clov chooses to stay in a place which he demonstrably hates, Hamm suggests that he has “a kind of great compassion” (45). This is not compassion as it was before the apocalypse, but the muscle memory of compassion which has lingered on into the characters’ current state. All they have now is the echoes of positive emotion which reverberate from the past, but these are not substantive or satisfying.

“I’m warming up for my last soliloquy.”

Hamm declares that he is “warming up for [his] last soliloquy” (46), framing his life as a performance in which he is the protagonist. He demands center stage for his speech, just as he demanded to be placed in the center of the stage when Clov was moving his chair. Hamm blurs the lines between the actors and the play itself, turning the existentialism of the play outward, toward the audience, making them aware that the sentiments felt by the characters on the stage are equally present in the contemporary world.

“Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.”

As Hamm mumbles to himself, he turns to the game of chess as a metaphor. The titular endgame is the phase of a chess match in which the players attempt to seal a victory. By this point, their plans have been enacted and they are set against one another. Hamm has entered into his own endgame, and as in a game of chess, there must be a losing player. Hamm has played again and feels that he has lost again. He is sick of losing, but it is all he knows.