Reading Order
Endgame Reading Order
Endgame (1957) by Samuel Beckett is the second of his major plays — Hamm (blind, paralyzed in a chair) and Clov (who cannot sit) in a bare shelter at the end of the world, with Hamm's legless parents Nagg and Nell in ashbins — and arguably the most formally perfect of his works. Where Waiting for Godot is organized around an external absence (Godot who never comes), Endgame is organized around an internal ending: the play's title refers to the final stage of a chess game, when all significant moves have been made, and the question is not how the game will go but only when it will end. Everything in Endgame is running out — the painkiller, the dog, Nell's life, the light, the world outside. The play is a meditation on dependency (Hamm cannot stand; Clov cannot sit; neither can function without the other) and on the impossibility of ending: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.' Beckett was a chess enthusiast, and Endgame thinks about the endgame of everything: consciousness, civilization, love, theater.
Where to start
Endgame (1957) — the complete play; the standard text is the Faber edition. Best reading order for Beckett's drama: Waiting for Godot → Endgame → Krapp's Last Tape → Happy Days. For his prose: Murphy → Watt → Molloy → Malone Dies → The Unnamable
Complete Endgame Book List
- 1Buy
Endgame
Samuel Beckett·1957·The masterwork — Hamm and Clov in the bare shelter, Nagg and Nell in the ashbins. The most formally perfect of Beckett's major plays, organized around the chess endgame as a metaphor for the terminal stage of everything: consciousness, civilization, love, theater itself - 2Buy
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett·1953·The companion and the play that made Beckett famous — Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot who never comes, with Pozzo and Lucky and the Boy as interruptions. Endgame and Waiting for Godot are the two essential Beckett plays: Waiting for Godot is organized around external absence (Godot), Endgame around internal ending (the game running out). Both plays are funnier in performance than they appear on the page - 3Buy
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov·1901·The most direct theatrical precursor — the Prozorov sisters waiting for Moscow, the talk that fills the gap, the comedy that is simultaneously elegy. Beckett acknowledged Chekhov as the most important influence on his theater, and the structural principle of Endgame (a group of people in a confined space talking, waiting, enduring, unable to leave or to act) is a development of Chekhov's method - 4Buy
The Chairs
Eugène Ionesco·1952·The French contemporary companion — the Old Man and Old Woman filling a room with empty chairs for the guests who will hear the Old Man's message, and the Orator who cannot speak. The Chairs and Endgame are companion works in the Theater of the Absurd: both are organized around the impossibility of communication, both use the minimal stage as a metaphor for consciousness, and both end with the destruction of the message that the play was organized around delivering - 5Buy
The Birthday Party
Harold Pinter·1958·Pinter's 1958 companion in the tradition of the play organized around menace and the impossibility of escape — Stanley Weber in a seaside boarding house, the arrival of Goldberg and McCann, the birthday party and its aftermath. The Birthday Party and Endgame are contemporary explorations of the same Kafkaesque situation: a person confined in a room with others, subjected to an interrogation whose rules they do not understand, with no possibility of genuine escape - 6Buy
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·The philosophical companion in the existentialist tradition — Antoine Roquentin's experience of the contingency of all existence, expressed as a physical nausea. Beckett's Endgame is in dialogue with Sartre's and Camus's existentialism (the end of the world, the absurdity of enduring, the impossibility of meaning) though Beckett rejected the existentialist label; the connection is in the shared post-war experience of civilization after the concentration camps and the atom bomb - 7Buy
The Trial
Franz Kafka·1925·Kafka's companion in the tradition of the confined protagonist subjected to an incomprehensible process — Josef K.'s arrest and trial for an unspecified crime. The Trial and Endgame share the same formal principle: a protagonist who cannot leave or fully understand the situation in which he is enclosed, whose attempts to escape or comprehend the situation only intensify it. Beckett read Kafka carefully and the influence is pervasive in his work - 8Buy
Molloy
Samuel Beckett·1951·The prose companion and the beginning of the Beckett trilogy — Molloy's journey toward his mother, and Moran's journey to find Molloy, both collapsing into immobility. Molloy is the best entry point into Beckett's prose for readers who want to understand what Endgame is doing: both are organized around the same reduction (the body deteriorating, the space contracting, the language failing) and both demonstrate that the comedy of Beckett is not decorative but structural
Endgame — Frequently Asked Questions
What does Endgame mean by Beckett?
Endgame takes its title from the final stage of a chess game: the endgame is the phase when all significant moves have been made, the outcome is in some sense determined, and the question is only how many moves remain before the game is concluded. Beckett uses this as a structural metaphor for everything the play dramatizes: Hamm and Clov are playing out the endgame of their relationship (everything of significance has already happened; they are enduring toward the end), of civilization (the world outside the shelter appears to be dead or dying), of life itself (Nagg and Nell are deteriorating in their ashbins), and of the play (Endgame is self-aware about being a play that is ending — 'This is deadly' says Hamm of the audience's experience). The title also refers to the endgame of Beckett's theatrical enterprise — after Waiting for Godot, what is there to say? Endgame says it.
Who are Hamm and Clov in Endgame?
Hamm (from 'ham actor', and possibly from 'hammer' or from the French 'hamac', hammock — he is never able to stand) is blind and paralyzed in a chair at the center of the stage; he cannot walk, and he has the only key to the larder. Clov (from the French 'clou', nail — he can only walk stiffly, never sit) can walk but cannot sit; he is dependent on Hamm for food and has been with him since childhood. Their names also recall chessmen: Hamm is the king (immobile, at the center), Clov is perhaps a pawn. Their relationship is one of mutual dependency and mutual torture — Hamm needs Clov to push his chair, look out the windows, bring him his telescope; Clov needs Hamm for food and perhaps for purpose. The play is organized partly around Clov's repeated threat and failure to leave — he wants to go, but cannot or will not, just as Vladimir and Estragon cannot leave in Waiting for Godot.
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