Codependency in Samuel Becketts Endgame Essay example -- Beckett Endg

Codependency in Samuel Beckett's Endgame "Clov asks, "What is there to keep us here?" Hamm answers, "The dialogue."" In the play Endgame, Samuel Beckett demonstrates dramatically the idea of codependency between the two focal characters who rely on each other to fulfill their own physical and psychological needs. Beckett accomplishes this through Hamm, who assumes the identity of a kingly figure, and his relationship with Clov, who acts as his subject. In Endgame, this idea is established by tone and humor in the dialogue amid Hamm and Clov. Samuel Beckett was an Irish-born poet, novelist, and foremost dramatist of the theater of the absurd. His surreal writings mixed humor into a world paralyzed and grief stricken with pain and anguish. Beckett's characters grasp for a meaningful existence amongst an unrelenting and disorderly world, finally finding release only within the confines of their own minds. The play Endgame is the story of a few survivors after some unknown apocalypse on Earth. Hamm, a blind man who lives in a small bare room with two windows, shutoff from the rest of the dead outside world, is accompanied by two legless parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in two dustbins. The remaining character is Clov, who acts as an enslaved son of Ham[HAC1]m, who answers to his beckon call and grants his requests. At the end of the play his parents have apparently died, and he has given up the struggle or reason to live on. It is now that Clov is on the verge of escape to leave his life of submission to Hamm, but to where? For there is nothing but a vast void of emptiness. Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin. As a child he was raised in a religiously oriented, Protestant, mid... ...down the lids of Hamm's parent's dustbins as well, Hamm being prone to exercising his direct power over him: "Bottle him!" he cries out (10). Finally, the relationship between Hamm and Clov can be aggregated in the theme of this codependent nature that each fulfills for one another. This is relevant to today's society in that it examines the basic underlying structural dependence of a monarchical or dictatorship type form of government, of the needs and duties of a King or leader with his subjects. In this way, the King would provide protection and leadership for his subjects, while they would owe homage in the form of taxes and loyalty in allegiance to him. Similarly in the play, Hamm provides the protection from the starvation and desolation of the outside world beyond his store, and Clov repays this buy waiting on Hamm's requests, however reluctantly.