Recommendations
Books Like Krapp's Last Tape
Best books to read after Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
Readers who love Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett are drawn to its combination of the perfect dramatic image of the old man and his tape recorder, the devastating gap between the young Krapp's hope and the old Krapp's failure, and the investigation of what memory actually is — they want plays and novels that deal with the impossibility of recovering the past, the relationship between the self you were and the self you are, and the tradition of the Beckettian meditation on time.
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Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
The companion organized around two figures waiting. The companion investigation of characters who cannot escape their situation; where Krapp is organized around a man alone with his past, Godot is organized around two men together with no past and no future
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Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett
The companion organized around a single figure's compulsive monologue — Winnie buried in her mound. The companion Beckett play as an investigation of the relationship between the habit of talking and the existence that talking is supposed to organize or sustain
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Endgame
by Samuel Beckett
The companion organized around characters who are stuck. Hamm and Clov and the couple in the ashcans: the companion investigation of the relationship between memory and the present moment
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Molloy
by Samuel Beckett
The first volume of Beckett's prose trilogy. The companion Beckett prose work as an investigation of the disintegration of memory, identity, and intention: the relationship between the Krapp of the tape and the Krapp of the stage is the relationship between Molloy and Moran
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In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
Proust's companion investigation of memory, time, and the impossibility of recovering the past. The companion masterwork: Beckett wrote his critical study of Proust arguing that only involuntary memory can recover the past, and Krapp's Last Tape is organized around the discovery that tape-recorded memory — voluntary, mechanical — cannot recover the person Krapp was
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That Time
by Samuel Beckett
The companion late Beckett play organized around three voices speaking to a face that listens. The companion investigation of the relationship between the person who remembers and the memories that constitute them: the three voices speak from three different moments in the past, and the face that listens is the self that has survived all three
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Ohio Impromptu
by Samuel Beckett
The late companion Beckett play organized around listening — a reader reads to a listener. The companion investigation of the same question that organizes Krapp: what is the relationship between the one who speaks and the one who listens, when both are versions of the same person?
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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Didion's companion investigation of grief and the impossibility of recovering the past — the year after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. The companion to Krapp as an investigation of what we do when the person we have recorded (in memory, in writing, in the habits of a shared life) is no longer there to receive our recordings
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