—Anonymous
One of the literary text that was challenging was the short story, “Endgame” by Samuel Beckett. Furthermore, it was our group’s job to present the story to the class which means that I needed to have a sound understanding of it. However, the short story or the play was not written in the traditional method. When reading plays, readers are usually informed in detail about the settings, the characters and their roles in the play, but in the End Game, readers are thrown into the middle of a scene. The settings are very minimal and the dialogues between the characters are super short, nor there was any growth in the plot. With such assembly of the story, it mentally challenged me because I was able to go through pages of the story swiftly but was not grasping any meaning or the theme of the story. This was emotionally discouraging because time and effort were placed into that story, and not being able to understand made me feel unintelligent. With the due dates coming, it became overwhelming and I assume that it was beyond my capabilities. So, the only option I had was to gain a deeper understanding, to do that I need to understand what kind of author he was and his objective for writing each story. Samuel Beckett is known for his “theater of absurd” which looks into the human existence. These new sets of information allowed me to engage the story through the lens of existentialism. The main theme of the play, the idea of the absurdity of life was very similar to the one of existentialism story myth of Sisyphus. After re-reading the play again with the new lens, the story was very meaningful and powerful because it’s one of the stories that are timeless and will always be relevant at any time. For instance, Hamm’s treatment towards his parents can be still compared to how we treat our parents. The play explores the idea of how the end and the beginning are intertwined, basically a big circle that keeps repeating again and again. Just like how the Greek Hero Sisyphus was punished by Gods to push the big stone to the top of the hill, only to roll it down at the bottom of the hill and repeating the cycle again and again. It’s evident in the play when Clov who keeps pushing the idea of leaving Hamm only to go back to him and repeating the same idea, again and again. It explores the theme of absurdity, where the characters like Clov was trying to find a meaning of life in a meaningless world. Clov is treated very harshly by his master, his suffering was coming from Haamm, yet he still stays with him. Similarly, another absurdity is the idea that Hamm has of himself being the authoritative figure or sort of like a King, telling everyone what to do, always at the center of the room, and being inconsiderate to others. Whereas in reality, he is a blind character who sits in a wheelchair and is very dependent on others. Finally, the theme of the story can be compared to our lives where sometimes we promise to give up a certain bad habit which we know is bad for us but never do so. Thus, a story that was very hard to find meaning became very meaningful.
