In Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, he creates a setting that is dark and dull in an attempt to portray the tone of the play to the reader. The setting of the stage is crucial for people who are recreating Endgame to present a modern day version of the play because of their undertones. The stage should be likened to a skull with two windows on the back wall forming the eye sockets of this skull while the characters represent the brain and memory. By setting up the stage like this it creates an atmosphere where the stage is serving as a metaphor for an aging mind, helping to depict the nihilistic worldview that Beckett is trying to represent, which rely more on feeling then philosophy.

The worldview that Beckett proposes in Endgame is a nihilistic viewpoint that depicts modern man’s sorry state in a world without transcendence. Nihilism argues that life is without objective meaning purpose or intrinsic value. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a play about nothing whose characters lack the ability to move forward with their mundane lives. The story is told in fragments and the dialogues in the play are often interrupted by yawns, pauses and coughs. The play can be a different experience based on the person reading or performing it because a lot of the flow in the play relies on pausing and reading lines with emotion or lack thereof.

An example from the text that highlights the nihilistic tone in the play is when Hamm is asking Clov in the beginning of the play if anyone has more misery then him and is complaining to Clov about the situation he currently finds himself in. In the middle of this dialogue, Hamm yawns in the middle of the word absolute breaking the word into two portions. A (yawn) bsolute. Hamm’s negative connotation about absolute power and the existence of a higher power sets the tone for the rest of the play. Beckett wants us to look at his characters from a nihilistic worldview in which we should deny any possibility of knowledge, reality, value and beauty.